The Big Biden Policy Idea That Nobody (Not Even Joe Biden) Is Discussing

LOADING ERROR LOADING There’s been lots of buzz about President Joe Biden’s health care agenda and which proposals he’s going to make a priority. But almost nobody is talking publicly about an idea that could do a ton of good: Getting health insurance for the low-income people who are part of what’s come to be known as the “Medicaid gap.” There are about 4 million of these Americans, according to estimates ― many of them food servers or retail clerks, parts of the child care workforce or, in some cases, among the ranks of the unemployed. Medicaid expansion is the part of the Affordable Care Act that has received the most rigorous and sustained attention from researchers, and there’s now a long list of published papers showing that it “has improved health outcomes and increased financial security for millions,” as Judith Solomon, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told HuffPost. And these are the most vulnerable among those who remain uninsured.” Filling The Medicaid Gap Is Doable, But Complex As a presidential candidate, Biden’s plan to help people in the Medicaid gap was to enroll them automatically into a new “public option,” a government-run insurance plan that Democrats would create through legislation. Although neither the administration nor Democratic leaders are focusing on a large public option right now, there is serious discussion of creating some kind of scaled-down version ― basically, a new program that looks like Medicaid ― that would be open only to low-income people in non-expansion states.