A majority of the Supreme Court appeared inclined Monday to reject a conservative challenge to Obamacare, leaving in place the federal government’s authority to require insurers to cover everything from depression screenings to HIV prevention drugs at no cost to patients.

And, in an odd twist, it was the Trump administration defending the health law that the president has spent more than a decade excoriating.

Health policy and politics are inextricably linked. Policy is about what the government can do to shift the financing, delivery, and quality of health care, so who controls the government has the power to shape those policies. 

President Joe Biden is widening a critical window for low-income Americans to join Obamacare, in a move aimed at reinforcing a central element of his reelection bid: That he presided over a historic expansion of health care coverage.

Tens of millions of people eliminated from Medicaid would now have until Nov. 30 to sign up for new coverage under a plan to be announced Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services and first shared with POLITICO — an extension from the July 31 deadline initially set for the special enrollment period.

President Joe Biden directly targeted Republican frontrunner Donald Trump at a campaign event Tuesday, treating him as the de facto nominee and warning of the consequences for voters if his political rival is returned to the White House.

“Donald Trump and extreme MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Colorado. “The choice facing us could not be more stark.”

The Biden campaign is eagerly planning to make the Affordable Care Act a bigger issue after former President Donald Trump said Saturday that he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” to Obamacare.

“The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “I’m seriously looking at alternatives. We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it. It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”

After four straight years of premium declines, Affordable Care Act policies will be more costly in 2023. However, most enrollees won’t feel the increase thanks to enhanced federal subsidies that congressional Democrats were able to extend.

The average monthly premium for the benchmark silver plan in 2023 will rise by 4% in the 33 states participating in the federal exchange, healthcare.gov, according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released Wednesday. That compares to a 3% drop for this year.

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.

As the midterm elections draw near, President Joe Biden has delivered campaign-style speeches that misstated statistics on the COVID-19 pandemic, may leave the wrong impression that police officers were killed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and overstated the impact of the Affordable Care Act.

The remarks were made in the battleground state of Pennsylvania and at events hosted by the Democratic National Committee. Biden has touched on these themes repeatedly, sometimes wording the claims differently.

Wrong COVID-19 Stats