Biden, fresh off his illegal $500 billion student-loan-forgiveness handout, on Tuesday announced another lawless action, this time on Obamacare.
President Biden, fresh off his illegal $500 billion student-loan-forgiveness handout, on Tuesday announced another lawless action, this time on Obamacare.
Ever since its inception, one of the issues facing Obamacare has been the so-called “family glitch.” This issue arose out of efforts to prevent an exodus of workers from employer-based health care to Obamacare. Under the law, workers cannot obtain insurance through Obamacare’s exchanges if they receive an offer of “affordable” health insurance from their employers, with “affordable” being defined as less than 9.5 percent of income. However, the key is that the law specifies that the 9.5 percent threshold applies to individual insurance offered to the employee, not family insurance extended to the employee’s entire household. That means that many families were caught in a zone in which they can’t afford employer insurance, but don’t qualify for Obamacare.
Declaring, “Health care should be a right, not a privilege,” Biden said that the Treasury Department was finalizing an administrative action that would “fix” the problem, effective next month. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that ending the “family glitch” would cost up to $44 billion over a decade.
As Peter J. Nelson outlined in Health Affairs when the Biden “fix” was initially proposed, the text of Obamacare clearly says that the affordability threshold applies to individual rather than family insurance. In fact, the Obama administration itself concluded in 2011 — the year after Obamacare was signed into law — that there could be no administrative fix since the statute links eligibility to the affordability of individual coverage.
But Biden has shown that he is unwilling to be constrained by the law. He ran on the idea of restoring democratic norms and took an oath of office, and yet he is shredding the Constitution — with the eviction moratorium, mass student-loan forgiveness, and now this illegal Obamacare “fix.” Progressives and their allies in the media, who have spent the last seven years warning about the death of democracy, seem to be okay with Biden behaving like a dictator as long as they believe he is a benevolent one.