Hours after releasing his budget proposal for fiscal 2025, President Joe Biden on Monday traveled to New Hampshire to lay out his goals on health care – and draw a stark line on the issue between himself and the GOP.
Speaking at a YMCA in Goffstown, just outside of Manchester, Biden touted his efforts to lower health care costs for Americans – highlighting the actions he frequently cites as his biggest successes in the area: capping insulin costs at $35 a month and total out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 per year for Medicare patients, enabling Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices as well as record Affordable Care Act enrollment during his administration.
“As I said in my State of the Union, I’m doing everything I can to lower health care costs to provide peace of mind, ” Biden said on Monday. “Not at the expense of doctors or medicine or the hospitals or the drug companies – just to make it fair.”
But the president also used the visit to urge Congress to go further and act on policy goals the White House laid out last week ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address.
“Now it's time to go further and give Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for even more drugs over the next decade,” Biden said. Folks [if] we’re able to do that, [it] will not only save lives, we’re gonna save taxpayers another estimated $200 billion – $200 billion dollars taxpayers will not have to pay drug companies for exorbitant prices.”
Specifically, Biden wants those on Capitol Hill to expand his $2,000 prescription drug and $35 insulin cap beyond those on Medicare to all Americans on private insurance, give Medicare the power to negotiate the price of 50 drugs per year rather than 20 and permanently extend the health insurance premium tax credits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The White House noted that millions of Americans will see their health insurance premiums spike next year without an extension.
“A record breaking 21 million Americans have signed up for health care under the ACA, including 65,000 folks right here in New Hampshire,” Biden said. “I enacted tax credits to save on average $800 per person per year reducing health care premiums for millions of working families under the Affordable Care Act.”
“Those tax credits expire next year,” he continued. “I'm calling on Congress to make and expand the Affordable Care Act tax credits and make them permanent – make them permanent.”
Republicans’ crusade against the Affordable Care Act – the health care overhaul signed by former President Barack Obama and colloquially known as Obamacare – largely quieted in the years after three GOP senators voted against repealing it during the Trump administration in 2017.
But former President Donald Trump reawakened the fight last year when he warned the legislation could be on the chopping block again should he win back the White House in 2024.
“The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site Truth Social in November of last year.
And on Monday, Biden, who is seeking another four years in the White House, leaned fully into the contrast between his goals and the GOP’s, seeking to sharpen the juxtaposition of his agenda on health care with that of Republicans and Trump – who Biden is likely to face in a rematch this November.
“Over 100 million Americans can no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition,” Biden said. “But my predecessor and many Republicans want to take that away – take that protection away by repealing the Affordable Care Act. I’m not gonna let that happen.”
The president went on to slam Trump’s comments just hours earlier in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” in which he said “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements — in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and bad management of entitlements.”
The topic of slashing entitlements received widespread attention following last year’s State of the Union address, which featured a lively exchange between Biden and Republicans in the crowd after the president said some in the GOP want Social Security and Medicare to sunset. Some Republicans booed Biden's assertion, leading the president to declare “unanimity” around protecting the programs.
The former president did not go on to further explain what he meant when he spoke about cutting entitlements on Monday. His campaign, however, sought to play down the comment, saying he was talking about “cutting waste.”
“Even this morning, Donald Trump said cuts to Social Security Medicare are on the table,” Biden told those in attendance at his remarks on Monday. .
“I'm never gonna allow that to happen. I won't cut social security, I won’t cut medicare,” Biden said. “Instead of cutting medicare and medicaid and giving tax breaks to the wealthy, I will protect and strengthen social security and medicare to make the wealthy begin to pay their fair share.”
Biden’s trip to New Hampshire on Monday marks his first of the election year. The incumbent president chose not to put his name on the state’s primary ballot in January after local officials defied the Democratic National Committee’s decision to make South Carolina the party’s first primary of 2024.
Regardless, Biden won the Democratic primary through write-in votes but delegates for the party’s presidential nomination are unlikely to be awarded.
Despite successful efforts by New Hampshire Democrats to turn out enough write-in votes to secure a symbolic victory for the president, Biden’s support of the new DNC lineup stripping New Hampshire of its long-held first-in-the-nation title deeply disappointed some Democrats in the state.
Biden won the Granite State over Trump in 2020 by about 7 percentage points.