President Biden News: Live Updates

Eleven years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, the reach of the law is growing, with hundreds of thousands flocking to its marketplace and even deeply conservative states considering its Medicaid expansion.

More than 200,000 Americans signed up for health insurance under the law during the first two weeks of an open enrollment period created by President Biden — a sign that those who lost insurance during the pandemic remain in desperate need of coverage, according to federal officials and health policy experts.

And a provision in the president’s $1.9 trillion stimulus law to make Medicaid expansion more fiscally appealing has convinced deep-red Alabama and Wyoming to consider expanding the program to residents whose incomes are too high to qualify now but too low to afford private health plans.

Tuesday is the 11th anniversary of the health law’s signing, and the Biden White House is going to mark the occasion in a big way. The president will travel to Ohio as part of his “Help Is Here” tour to talk up the stimulus bill, which also expanded subsidies to make insurance affordable for middle-class people. And his newly installed health secretary, Xavier Becerra, will travel to Carson City, Nev.

But Mr. Biden now has a new challenge: living up to his campaign promise to expand the law, including creating a “public option” for a government-run insurance plan, and tackling not only the rising cost of health insurance premiums but also the costs of prescription drugs. For that, he will need the cooperation of Congress.

“The Affordable Care Act was about trying to create the ground rules so that health insurance was real, it provided real financial security and was affordable, but we’re at this point where we’ve got to address the other side of the equation,” said Frederick Isasi, executive director of Families U.S.A., a consumer advocacy group.

“We’ve got to address the sector’s pricing abuses, and that’s fundamentally the big question the administration and Congress are facing,” Mr. Isasi added. “Are they going to have the political will to do that?”

On Capitol Hill, progressives recently introduced legislation to create what they call Medicare for all, a broad government-run insurance program that has been embraced by Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.

Expanding access to health care has been a core issue for Mr. Biden, both when he was vice president and during his campaign for the White House. A week after he took office, he ordered the law’s insurance marketplaces to reopen for three months, from February to May 15, to help people struggling to find coverage.

In previous years, only those who had “qualifying life events,” including job losses, were eligible to sign up outside of the traditional fall enrollment period, and the…