When implementing his national health-care program, Barack Obama repeatedly sought to fix the law’s problems through executive actions that bypassed Congress. President Biden has now gone further. This week, Biden announced plans to unilaterally rewrite Obamacare — in a move so extreme that it was explicitly rejected by even the Obama administration.

At issue is the “family glitch” that has made a subset of lower-income American families ineligible for Obamacare. The way the law was written, workers cannot qualify to receive Obamacare subsidies if they are offered affordable insurance from their employers — “affordable” being defined as costing less than 9.5 percent of household income. However, as written, the 9.5 percent threshold is calculated based on the cost of insuring only the individual employee, rather than the cost of coverage for an entire family. Thus, some families struggling to pay the premiums of employer insurance do not qualify for Obamacare.

Though it is often portrayed as an accident by Congress, it makes sense that the law was drafted the way it was. At the time it was being written, Democrats were pushing back against the idea that Obamacare posed a threat to employer-based insurance — and if the Congressional Budget Office assumed more people would have ended up on Obamacare, it could have driven up the cost of the legislation. That said, even if Democrats now want to rewrite the legislative history, what ultimately matters is what is in the actual text that Congress voted on.