“That was a policy that really made a huge difference in ensuring access to much needed COVID treatment, testing and, subsequently, vaccines,” Murphy said. In fact, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, uninsured rates ticked down in 2020 from 2019. However, they still remained higher than when Trump took office.
In contrast to Trump, Biden campaigned for president in 2020 on a promise of expanding and protecting the ACA. Eight days after his inauguration, he signed an executive order that made it easier to enroll in Medicaid and private plans by giving people more time to sign up for insurance. He also reversed some of Trump’s executive orders that weakened the ACA by granting federal agencies broad discretion to change, delay or waive provisions of the law they considered financially burdensome.
In addition, Biden signed the American Rescue Act in March 2021, which expanded the availability of subsidies and tax credits for low- and moderate-income people seeking health insurance through the ACA. His signature climate and health bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, extended those provisions through 2025.
By proposing an updated tax law, the Biden administration also managed to fix the “family glitch,” an Internal Revenue Service interpretation of the ACA that made employer-sponsored family health insurance unaffordable for more than 5 million people. If an employer’s coverage plan was too costly, the fix allowed family members to access federal subsidies to make the insurance more affordable.
All those policies helped send the uninsured population plummeting.
Black and Latino populations, who have historically had lower coverage rates than white people, experienced some of the highest rates of coverage gains.
But attributing all coverage gains to Biden’s policy agenda may not be the whole story, according to Cha.
“The last four years, it’s been extremely hard to disentangle any policy from the fact that we’ve been operating in a pandemic and post-pandemic era,” Cha said.
