Joe Biden's New Health Care Plan Is an Admission that Obamacare Doesn't Work

Joe Biden is pretending to defend Obamacare while implicitly admitting it has failed to live up to its promises. 

Yesterday, the former vice president debuted a new health care plan, which would expand subsidies in the program while creating a new government-run health insurance plan—a "public option"—that would be available inside the exchanges. 

Currently, people who make up to 400 percent of the poverty line, about $48,000 for an individual or about $100,000 for a family of four, are eligible to receive subsidies for coverage purchased through the law's health insurance exchanges, insulating those people from much of the cost of coverage. Those who make more than the 400 percent threshold, however, tend to face extremely high premiums; Biden's plan would simply cap premiums at 8.5 percent of household income. The additional subsidies, as well as the implementation of the public option, would cost about $750 billion over a decade, according to his campaign—not too much less than the $940 billion Obamacare was estimated to cost over its first decade. 

Biden's plan is notable mostly for its explicit rejection of Medicare for All, the single-payer plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and backed by rival candidates such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), Kamala Harris (D–Ca.), and Cory Booker (D–N.J.). The Sanders plan would eliminate virtually all private insurance in the space of just four years, forcing everyone into a single government-run insurance system. By any measure, it would be tremendously disruptive, and polls show that even if the idea of Medicare for All is popular, the elimination of private insurance is not.

It is also a defense of Medicare as it exists today, one that mirrors the tack that President Trump and other Republicans have taken against Sanders' single-payer proposal: At an AARP event last night, Biden warned that with Medicare for All, "Medicare as you know it goes away."