President Joe Biden is highlighting the Affordable Care Act in his 2024 campaign as the law turns 14 and after his Republican opponent signaled loose plans for its demise.
President Biden's reelection team indicated in fall 2023 that the White House was prepared to make the ACA a focal point of the 2024 campaign after former President Donald Trump renewed calls to take another shot at repealing it.
President Biden spoke about the law in his State of the Union address March 7, crediting it for protecting health insurance for more than 100 million people with pre-existing conditions. On March 23, the Biden campaign released a video featuring him with ACA architects, former President Barack Obama and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking to the law's origins and effects.
Mr. Obama and then-Vice President Biden passed the ACA on March 23, 2010, then as the respective president and vice president. "It can be easy to forget these days, but passing the ACA was hard," Mr. Obama says in the campaign video.
"Now Trump keeps telling us he's going to terminate the ACA," President Biden says. "Think about what that means. It would mean 100 million people Americans with preexisting conditions would lose their healthcare coverage. It would mean young people would be kicked off their parents' coverage. Tens of millions of Americans would lose healthcare coverage as a consequence."
Over 20 million people have enrolled in individual insurance plans on the ACA exchange for 2024, CMS said Jan. 10. The enrollment total is the highest in the exchange's history, surpassing last year's enrollment of 16 million.
On March 26, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are expected to highlight their administration's work on healthcare affordability and access during their visit to North Carolina, a key presidential battleground, The New York Times reports.
Mr. Trump took to social media last fall to renew calls for the replacement of the ACA after a stretch of time in which the healthcare law was not a central issue in U.S. political campaigns. Since then, some in the Republican party have signaled reluctance to join him in that particular fight.
The ACA is the most challenged statute in American history, including its seven Supreme Court challenges in a decade, according to professors at Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University. Most recently, in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to the ACA, in which plaintiffs argued that the law should be struck down due to the 2017 elimination of the ACA's tax penalty.
As of February, about 6 in 10 U.S. adults hold a favorable opinion of the ACA while about 4 in 10 hold a negative opinion of the law, according to KFF.