President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign wants voters to contrast his record on health care policy with his predecessor’s. In May, Biden’s campaign began airing a monthlong, $14 million ad campaign targeting swing-state voters and minority groups with spots on TV, digital, and radio.
In the ad, titled "Terminate," Biden assails former President Donald Trump for his past promises to overturn the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Biden also warns of the potential effect if Trump is returned to office and again pursues repeal.
"That would mean over a hundred million Americans will lose protections for preexisting conditions," Biden said in the ad.
Less than six months from election day, polls show Trump narrowly leading Biden in a head-to-head race in most swing states, And voters trust Trump to better handle issues such as inflation, crime and the economy by significant margins.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll of about 2,200 adults released in early May, shows the only major policy issues on which Biden received higher marks than Trump were health care and abortion access. It’s no surprise, then, that the campaign is making those topics central to Biden’s pitch to voters.
As such, we dug into the facts surrounding Biden’s claim.
Preexisting condition calculationsThe idea that 100 million Americans are living with one or more preexisting conditions is not new. It was the subject of a back-and-forth between then-candidate Biden and then-President Trump during their previous race, in 2020. After Biden cited that statistic in a presidential debate, Trump responded, "There aren’t a hundred million people with preexisting conditions."
A KFF Health NewsPolitiFact HealthCheck at the time rated Biden’s claim to be "mostly true," finding a fairly large range of estimates — from 54 million to 135 million — of the number of Americans with preexisting conditions. Estimates on the lower end tend to consider "preexisting conditions" to be more severe chronic conditions such as cancer or cystic fibrosis. Estimates at the spectrum’s higher end include people with more common health problems such as asthma and obesity, and behavioral health disorders such as substance use disorder or depression.
Biden’s May ad focuses on how many people would be vulnerable if protections for people with preexisting conditions were lost. This is a matter of some debate. To understand it, we need to break down the protections put in place by the ACA, and those that exist separately.
Before and afterBefore the ACA’s preexisting condition protections took effect in 2014, insurers in the individual market — people buying coverage for themselves or their families — could charge higher premiums to people with particular conditions, restrict coverage of specific procedures or medications, set annual and lifetime coverage limits on benefits or deny people coverage.
"There were a number of practices used by insurance companies to essentially protect themselves from the costs associated with people who have preexisting conditions," said Sabrina Corlette, a co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University and an expert on the health insurance marketplace.
Insurers providing coverage to large employers could impose long waiting periods before employees’ benefits kicked in. And though employer-sponsored plans couldn’t discriminate against individual employees based on their health conditions, small-group plans for businesses with fewer than 50 employees could raise costs across the board if large numbers of employees in a given company had such conditions. That could prompt some employers to stop offering coverage.
"The insurer would say, ‘Well, because you have three people with cancer, we are going to raise your premium dramatically,’ and therefore make it hard for the small employer to continue to offer coverage to its workers because the coverage is simply unaffordable," recalled Edwin Park, a research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy who researches public health insurance markets.
As a result, many people with preexisting conditions experienced what some researchers dubbed "job lock." People felt trapped in their jobs because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get health insurance anywhere else.