Joe Biden As A Candidate

Joe Biden is a 76 years old democratic candidate who is running for president in 2020. He was born in Scranton, Pa; lives in Wilmington, Delaware. Mr. Biden served as vice president in the Obama administration during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and health care remains a top priority for him. It’s an issue he often discusses in the context of his family’s personal tragedies: He lost his first wife and a baby daughter in a car accident in 1972, and in 2015, his son Beau Biden died of brain cancer. Health care is “personal” to him. As president, Biden will protect the Affordable Care Act from these continued attacks. He opposes every effort to get rid of this historic law – including efforts by Republicans, and efforts by Democrats. Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate.

For Biden, this is personal. He believes that every American has a right to the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have access to affordable, quality health care. He knows that no one in this country should have to lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering, “what will I do if she gets breast cancer?” or “if he has a heart attack?” “Will I go bankrupt?” He knows there is no peace of mind if you cannot afford to care for a sick child or a family member because of a pre-existing condition, because you’ve reached a point where your health insurer says “no more,” or because you have to decide between putting food on the table and going to the doctor or filling a prescription. Under Biden's plan, no one would be required to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income toward health insurance premiums.

Joe Biden also plans for eliminating the 'Hyde Amendment,' an annual rider to the spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services that forbids the use of federal funds to pay for most abortions. Biden recently ran into some difficulty when his position on the Hyde amendment was unclear. Beyond that, Biden's plan also directly calls for the federal government to fund some abortions. '[T]he public option will cover contraception and a woman's constitutional right to choose,' his plan says.

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act very nearly failed to become law after an intraparty fight between Democrats who supported and opposed federal funding for abortions. Abortion opponents wanted firm guarantees in permanent law that no federal funds would ever be used for abortion; abortion-rights supporters called that a deal-breaker. Eventually, a shaky compromise was reached.

And while it is true that there are now far fewer Democrats in Congress who oppose abortion than there were in 2010, the idea of even a Democratic-controlled Congress voting for federal abortion funding seems far-fetched. The current Democratic-led House has declined even to include a repeal of the Hyde Amendment in this year's HHS spending bill because it could not get through the GOP-controlled Senate or get signed by President Trump.

Biden has been repeatedly asked if he has any regrets about Obama-era deportation policies or if he would have done anything differently. He has responded mostly by evading the question and saying that “President Obama did a heck of a job.”That “heck of a job” that Biden refers to includes the implementation since March 2008 of a program called “Secure Communities,” which is basically a simplified model for state and local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. It allows participating jails to submit fingerprints of those arrested to immigration databases to identify individuals who are deportable. Biden will — and should — continue to be challenged on the harmful policies that were implemented when he was vice president and those he supported during his long Senate career.