24 NEWSWEEK.COM
oe biden campaigned on
a promise to fix Obamacare
rather than make sweeping
changes like enacting Medi-
care for All. In his first ma-
jor legislative proposal, the
$1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill currently making
its way through Congress, he’s already included a key
component of his plan: expanding subsidies to make
health insurance more affordable for more people.
But it will take more than a few Obamacare
tweaks tucked into a budget bill to fix what’s wrong
with the U.S. health care system—failures that the
coronavirus pandemic have exposed and under-
scored. America’s public-health failure in the cur-
rent crisis reflects the country’s long, sorry record
of neglect, poor organization, underfunding, and
misplaced priorities when it comes to public health.
Add to those woes the sky-high cost of health care,
uneven access and relatively poor outcomes, it’s clear
the American public has been living for decades
with a health system that is failing.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act—also known as
Obamacare—was designed to start addressing
these and other shortcomings. But four years of
the Trump presidency, persistent resistance from
both Republican-led states and entrenched health
care interests and, finally, a devastating pandemic
have conspired to undercut many of the hoped-for
benefits. That leaves America in danger of emerging
from the pandemic with worse prospects for health
than ever before.
Can Joe Biden get American health back on track?
Biden is already taking steps to shore up
Obamacare. Expanding subsidies, along with Biden’s
recent executive order to reopen the ACA’s markets
and advertise heavily to entice people to enroll, could
make a major dent in the ranks of uninsured Amer-
icans that have grown during the pandemic and
subsequent economic downturn. He has promised
to create a Medicare-like government-run health-in-
surance plan that people of any age can buy into—the
so-called “public option” that will compete with pri-
vate plans on the Obamacare insurance marketplace—
and to lower drug prices and eliminate “surprise bill-
ing” from hospitals. But these are only first steps.
Bringing the U.S. up to the standards of other de-
veloped nations—it currently ranks near the bottom
among developed countries on major measures ofWE CAN’T EVEN
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