Biden and his former boss have teamed up to compare healthcare legacies and promote record Obamacare enrollment.

Obama, Biden Get Back Together For Healthcare Push.

On Saturday, June 5, President Joe Biden teamed up with his old boss, former president Barack Obama, for a joint video montage on healthcare as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a record number of participants in health coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 

“31 million Americans have health coverage through the Affordable Care Act—a record,” an HHS press release announced, adding that more than 1 million new enrollees have been added since Biden’s Special Enrollment Period (SEP) began on February 15. Biden’s American Rescue Plan stimulus package boosted eligibility for tax credits and lower premiums for Obamacare users.

The White House released a three-minute video Saturday of Biden and Obama singing one another’s praises on healthcare policy and encouraging Americans to take advantage of the SEP ending August 15.

“You were so good when Beau was dying,” Biden said. “I literally remember sitting on the bed with him a week or so from passing away and thinking, what in God’s name would I do if I got a notice from the insurance company saying ‘You’ve outrun your coverage’?” Biden has often invoked his late son’s death to brain cancer to promote building on the ACA and reject Medicare for All, and has discussed his son very frequently in recent days. 

“We always talked about how, if we could get the principle of universal coverage established, we could then build on it,” Obama said. The former president offered (less-than-extemporaneous) praise to his former vice president for his actions on healthcare and quipped that “HealthCare.gov works like a charm these days,” referring to the platform’s infamously failed launch during his administration.

The Supreme Court is expected to release a decision at any time in the second major legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. The law has been challenged by a group of states led by Texas who contend that with the tax penalty for uninsured Americans reduced to zero as of 2017, the mandate requiring all Americans to buy insurance is no longer a valid use of Congress’s taxing power—rendering the whole law unconstitutional. 

More From Biden Press Office.

• The president on Saturday released a statement recognizing 40 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, best known for his work on AIDS vaccines decades before Coronavirus, spoke over the weekend about a need to “get the ship righted again” in HIV/AIDS research after pandemic disruptions;
• Press secretary Jen Psaki announced in a statement that no one at the White House knew about the Justice Department’s gag order on New York Times executives regarding attempts to seize four reporters’ email logs as part of a leak investigation. The investigation began under former president Donald Trump and continued under Biden. The Justice Department also pursued such data in investigations conducted under the Obama administration, but Biden has called the practice “simply, simply wrong.”