WASHINGTON — Former President Barack Obama returns to the White House Tuesday for the first time since leaving office to promote his health care legislation that President Joe Biden wants to build on.
Biden is expected to announce new actions to improve the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
Democrats hoped to make permanent an extension of insurance subsidies included in a coronavirus relief package and close the Medicaid coverage gap in states that have not expanded Medicaid. But those proposals were part of the Build Back Better legislation that stalled in the Senate.
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Twenty-one former House Democrats who lost re-election after casting what they knew was a politically risky vote for the ACA urged party leaders to finish the job they sacrificed their seats for.
“We voted for this law knowing that it was flawed and would need to be improved and strengthened in the years to come,” they wrote last September in a letter to Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress.
When the bill passed in 2009 and 2010, Democrats’ efforts to keep the ACA’s overall cost down prevented them from making grants as large as they wanted, leaving some low-income earners and average struggling to pay premiums. and franchises.
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Republicans have repeatedly tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in Congress and in the courts. Last June, the Supreme Court dismissed another major challenge and allowed the law to stand, ruling that conservative states that targeted the individual warrant provision in a lawsuit lacked standing because they were not directly harmed.
Obama and Biden last appeared in public together on November 5, 2021, for General Colin Powell’s funeral in Washington and on September 11, 2021, for a ceremony in New York commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. . Obama has stumped for Biden several times during the 2020 presidential campaign.
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Biden is expected to host Obama later this year for a ceremony to unveil official portraits of the former Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama.
Biden stole some of the show during Obama’s 2010 signing of the Affordable Care Act, when he was overheard into a microphone whispering to Obama: “That’s a big f— —- case.” In his second term, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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