As Election Day approaches, attention continues to turn to the contest between Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, and her Republican challenger, businessman Eric Hovde.
Hovde, who is just behind Baldwin in registered voters according to an April 17 Marquette Law School poll, is trying to link his opponent to President Joe Biden, who has faced tough polling numbers in recent days.
Meanwhile, Baldwin is boasting about his past accomplishments.
More recently, that includes her role in passing the Affordable Care Act while she was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“When I worked on the Affordable Care Act, I wrote an amendment that allowed all young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turned 26. Overnight, millions of young Americans gained access to health care,” she wrote. May 5 X Post“I want to destroy everything,” Hovde said.
We focus on the first two parts of that statement: Did Baldwin author that amendment, one of the most popular in the entire law, and did the change happen overnight?
Let’s take a look.
Baldwin is credited with creating the under-26 clause.
A spokesman for Baldwin’s campaign said that while a lawmaker’s name is never attached to the thousands of provisions that make up a major bill like Obamacare, the senator (then a member of the House) has been repeatedly credited with the idea.
This includes a February 7, 2012 letter from former Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), then chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in which he thanked Baldwin for being the committee’s “leading voice” on health insurance access for young people.
“I am pleased that the amendment you authored to ensure young people can enroll in their parents’ or guardians’ health insurance was included in the final House bill,” Waxman wrote.
Baldwin and three colleagues from Maryland and Pennsylvania are credited with urging House leaders to make the change before it was included in the House version of the bill.
When the House and Senate bills were combined to create the Affordable Care Act, the provision remained, and Baldwin’s role in it is often cited among her accomplishments, especially during her first run for U.S. Senate against former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson.
An October 21, 2012, Wisconsin State Journal article about that election noted that Baldwin “drafted a provision that would allow children up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health insurance.”
According to a November 5, 2012 article in The Guardian, she “supported and even wrote the part of the health insurance bill that would allow children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26.”
And while campaigning for Baldwin in November 2012, former President Bill Clinton said, “Her amendment ensured that (former President Barack Obama’s) health reform law would allow people under the age of 26 to stay on their parents’ health insurance for the first time in history.”
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In this respect, she is right.
“Overnight” is an exaggeration, but the change happened quickly.
Turning to the second part of Baldwin’s argument, did millions of young Americans gain access to health care overnight?
The “millions” figure is easy: A June 8, 2012 Commonwealth Fund report estimated that in 2011, 6.6 million young people between the ages of 19 and 25 signed up or remained on their parents’ health insurance plans when they could not have done so before the provision went into effect.
But in politics, things rarely happen overnight.
Gerald Kominsky, a senior fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for Health Policy Research, said that’s an exaggeration but not far off the mark.
Kominsky said President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act on March 23, 2010, and the provision allowing people under the age of 26 to remain on their parents’ health insurance was set to take effect six months later, on Sept. 23, 2010. On that same day, insurers that offered dependent health benefits had to extend those benefits to adult children up to age 26, he said.
Meanwhile, former Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius had been pressuring insurers to make the changes as soon as May of that year, and more than 60 insurers agreed.
But once the provision goes into effect, parents will have to notify insurance companies and employers that they’re adding their children to their policies by claiming them as dependents, which is not as instantaneous a process as Baldwin’s post makes it out to be. Still, in political times, the change happened quickly, he said.
Our Verdict
“When I worked on the Obamacare bill, I wrote an amendment that allowed all young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turned 26,” Baldwin said. “Overnight, millions of young Americans gained access to health care.”
Sources say she drafted the clause.
And the bill gave millions of young Americans access to health insurance, though not as quickly as she had claimed.
The definition of “mostly true” is a statement that is accurate but requires clarification or additional information.
That applies here.
