Xavier Becerra is Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services; how did he vote on health issues in Congress?
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Xavier Becerra is Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services; how did he vote on health issues in Congress? GovTrack.us Follow Dec 17, 2020 · 5 min read

Former Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA34)

There has arguably never been a more important time for the Department of Health and Human Services, dating to its 1953 founding, than during a global pandemic. President-elect Joe Biden has nominated former Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA34) as the department’s head.

Currently the Attorney General of California, he served as a member of Congress from 1993 to 2017. His nomination must be confirmed by the Senate.

How did Becerra vote on issues of public health during his congressional tenure?

Voted to pass Obamacare

More commonly known as Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed the House by 219–212 in March 2010. Becerra voted in favor, as did most Democrats by 219–34. Republicans unanimously opposed by 0–178.

“123 Americans will die today because they do not have health insurance. Another 8,000 will lose their health insurance today,” Becerra said on the House floor the day the chamber passed the legislation. “Today we will accomplish what 100 years of Congresses could not. We will pass health care reform, not just for some, but for all Americans.”

In 2018, a number of states led by Texas sued to overturn the law’s constitutionality, on the basis of 2017’s congressional repeal of the individual mandate, which had previously required all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a financial penalty. The individual mandate had previously been upheld by 2012’s Supreme Court decision National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius as the crux of the entire law, so plaintiffs argue that ending that provision down means the entire law must be struck down accordingly.

After the Louisiana-based Fifth Circuit Appeals Court of Appeals ruled in favor of that legal argument, a different group of states led by California — and thus led by Becerra himself — appealed that decision to the Supreme Court in a case titled (what else?) California v. Texas. The Court will likely issue a decision a few months from now, though current signs from November’s oral arguments point to Becerra’s side likely winning.

Didn’t cosponsor repeal of Cadillac taxes on more expensive health insurance plans

The so-called “Cadillac tax” was a controversial Obamacare provision, which would add a 40% tax on employer-sponsored health insurance plans above $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family. While it was intended to tax only the most expensive plans, some studies estimated it could apply to as many as 82 percent of plans.

Most Democrats opposed the provision, despite supporting Obamacare overall. The provision’s implementation had been delayed more than once, most recently, scheduled to take effect in 2022.

A 2015 bill to repeal the Cadillac tax attracted 156 Democratic cosponsors along with 32 Republicans. But although more than 80 percent half of House Democrats cosponsored the bill, with 156 of the 188 House Democrats at the time, Becerra was not one of them.

While GovTrack Insider was unable to locate any explicit statements from Becerra explaining why, Paul N. Van de Water of the nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explained the reasoning for most of the tax’s proponents. “The excise tax has a strong policy rationale: it will help slow health care cost growth. In fact, it’s one of the ACA’s most important cost-containment measures,” Van de Water wrote. “It will discourage employers and employees from buying unusually high-cost health coverage that promotes the excess use of health care.”

The Cadillac tax’s repeal was nonetheless included inside a larger omnibus spending package that passed Congress and was signed into law in December 2019, after Becerra had already left Congress.

Voted to allow abortions after 20 weeks

In March 2015, through the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the House voted 242–184 to ban all abortions occurring 20 or more weeks after conception. Republicans voted almost entirely in favor by 238–4, while Democrats voted almost entirely against by 4–180. Becerra voted against.

“Arkansas asserts that its ban on abortions after 18 weeks is aimed at protecting maternal health. Its ban, however, disserves that purpose,” Becerra wrote in an amicus brief for a lawsuit challenging Arkansas’s recently-enacted law. “Indeed, overwhelming scientific evidence establishes that highly restrictive abortion laws (like Arkansas’s) lead to worse health outcomes for women and also fail to lower abortion rates. Moreover, there is a direct connection between restrictive abortion laws and higher maternal mortality rates.”

2015’s House-passed bill never received a vote in the Senate, even though the chamber was then (as now) controlled by Republicans. The House passed it again by 237–189 in 2017, after Becerra left Congress, but while a majority of senators voted in favor by 51–46, that failed to meet the three-fifths margin required for Senate cloture votes.

In the current Congress, no similar legislation has passed either chamber, likely because Republicans figure their best shot is no longer legislatively but rather through a Supreme Court repeal or narrowing of Roe v. Wade.

Cosponsored a public option

Obamacare required all Americans to have health insurance through purchasing private health insurance. Some Democrats thought that didn’t go far enough, advocating the creation of a so-called “public option” run by the government. To some extent this already exists, through the government-run Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the low-income. But no government-run healthcare option exists for all Americans, as it does in Europe or Canada.

Becerra cosponsored a 2010 bill to establish a federal public option. It didn’t receive a vote and the public option has never passed, but Biden supported the plan in his 2020 presidential campaign. “As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers,” Biden’s official plan reads. “It also will better coordinate among all of a patient’s doctors to improve the efficacy and quality of their care.”

President Barack Obama himself endorsed a public option in a 2016 column for Jama: The Journal of the American Medical Association, lamenting that it wasn’t included in the 2010 law because of reluctance on the part of a few Senate Democrats — most of whom (like Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson) were no longer still serving by 2016.

An estimate by the Congressional Budget Office calculated that such a public option would add an additional $158 billion to the deficit over a decade.

This article was written by GovTrack Insider staff writer Jesse Rifkin.

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