Biden’s fallen short on his health-care promises. Some states are trying to control costs themselves.
President Biden and his Democratic allies made big promises about health care on the campaign trail and beyond. He’s backed the public option, a government-run insurance plan that anyone could buy if they preferred it to commercial options. He said he’d end surprise billing and tackle ever-escalating drug prices. He’s spoken of cracking down on the pricing excesses of not-for-profit hospitals that pay their executives millions of dollars.
But a fractious Republican-led House determined to oppose most anything Biden wants, as well as understandably distracting crises (the Ukraine war, inflation, an epidemic of gun violence, war between Israel and Hamas), sidelined a good part of those ambitions.
Across the country, patients are hurting — physically and financially. One hundred million Americans carry medical debt, a KFF Health News investigation found. Average family insurance premiums have increased nearly 50 percent since 2013. Prices for new drugs and hospital stays are through the roof.
So a number of states, unwilling to wait on the federal government, are attempting to tame health-care costs in ways that far outpace ambitions or actions in the nation’s capital.
“We realized we could get a lot of good stuff done at the state level,” said Karen Keiser, president pro tempore of the Washington state Senate. Lawmakers in her state created their own version of a public option — Cascade Care, a plan for low-income people who don’t qualify for Medicaid, with premiums as low as $10 a month, she said.
The state also capped out-of-pocket insulin prices for all Washingtonians at $35 a month — going further than Biden and Democrats in Congress, who have so far only managed to limit prices for the critical medicine to treat diabetes for Americans on Medicare.