Biden’s healthcare plan lacks realistic solutions

Last week there was an opinion on the ACA, and the Biden plan for healthcare. I wanted to provide another angle to the conversation.

As mentioned last week, a Joe Biden presidency has promised to enact a plan that will insure 97% of Americans, add new options, ensure expansion of Medicaid to all 50 states, and protect Americans with preexisting conditions.

The plan assures us that 97% of Americans will be covered. This is very hard to do, especially without violating constitutional law.

Under past Supreme Court cases, there exists constitutional precedent on legislation like the ACA and the proposed Biden plan. New York v United States found that complete coercion of states to federal will was unconstitutional.

Later, in the case NFIB v Sibelius, the Supreme Court stated the penalty for staying uninsured under the ACA was non-coercive (thus constitutional) but could be coercive if the fine was larger.

Yet in that same ACA case, the court also stated that the proposed Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional, because the removal of federal funding for lack of Medicaid improvement was in fact, federal coercion.

In order to raise healthcare rates to 97%, the Biden plan must include either a federally coercive mandate, or a tax penalty to the tune of which would be considered coercive in the Supreme Court.

Similarly, the already attempted Medicaid expansion, which would by Biden’s own definition be a 50-state federal mandate on the states, has been proven unconstitutional as well.

Under the law, it would be impossible to set such a plan in place, lest Biden and congressional Democrats break fundamental constitutional protections.

The Biden plan is also detrimental to the economy and healthcare system.

Through the already effected ACA we have seen insurance rates spike, causing the middle/lower-middle class to suffer.

This act drives the cost of private insurance up, and forces businesses to take the burden of the increased rates.

Businesses who provide healthcare have had to downgrade healthcare plans provided to workers, or fire employees to pay for increased rates. All the while, every taxpayer experienced a raise in their taxes to pay for the operation.

The ACA has already placed plenty of burden on the working class which would redouble when the Biden plan, a more expansive version of the ACA, may come into effect.

Lastly, the past week’s opinion discussed an incomplete view of supposed social justice benefits brought by the ACA. The article stated increased healthcare coverage helped improve mortality rates in pregnant and infant minorities.

This improvement is positive, but simply claiming that a more expansive healthcare program will improve these rates is shallow and unresponsive of the greater problem. Confounding reasons for those stats include the single motherhood rate, and teen pregnancy rate.

According to the CDC, 70% of black mothers are single, and teen pregnancy rates for the Hispanic and black community are both twice that of the white community.

These are the issues that we need to address. When minority women have children at later, more financially stable ages, without being single mothers, the mortality rates for pregnant and infant minorities will improve immensely.

Simply slapping a healthcare band-aid on the issue does nothing but force minority women into a position of dependency to the government, which keeps these women from reaching their highest potential.