Bidencare Is a Really Big Deal

In 2010, at the signing of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, Joe Biden, the vice president at the time, was caught on a hot mic telling President Barack Obama that the bill was a “big deal.” OK, there was actually another word in the middle. Anyway, Biden was right.

And in one of his major unsung accomplishments — it’s amazing how many Americans believe that an unusually productive president hasn’t done much — President Biden has made Obamacare an even bigger deal, in a way that is improving life for millions of Americans.

As you may have noticed — as many Americans finally seem to be noticing — Biden has been racking up some pretty good numbers lately. Economic growth is still chugging along, defying widespread predictions of a recession, while unemployment remains near a 50-year low. Inflation, especially using the measure preferred by the Federal Reserve, has fallen close to the Fed’s target. The stock market keeps hitting new highs.

Oh, and murders have plummeted, with overall violent crime possibly hitting another 50-year low.

Biden deserves some political reward for this good news, given that Donald Trump and many in his party predicted economic and social disaster if he were elected, and that Republicans, in general, are still talking as if America were suffering from high inflation and runaway crime. (Trump, of course, has been dismissing the good jobs numbers as fake. Wait until he hears about falling crime.)

It’s less clear how much of the good news on these fronts can be attributed to Biden’s policies. Presidents definitely don’t control the stock market. They have less influence in general on the economy than many believe; I would give Biden some credit for the economy’s strength, which was in part driven by his spending policies, but the rapid disinflation of 2023 mainly reflects a nation working its way out of lingering disruptions from the Covid pandemic. The same is probably true for the plunge in violent crime.

One area where presidents do make a big difference, however, is health care. Obamacare — which arguably should really be called Pelosicare, since Nancy Pelosi (who is not, whatever Trump may think, the same person as Nikki Haley) played a key role in getting it through Congress — led to big gains in health insurance coverage when it went into full effect in 2014.