Obamacare Draws 200,000 New Enrollments as Deep-Red States Eye Medicaid

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 current surge in enrollment is more than double the number of people who signed up during the same two-week periods in 2019 and 2020.

Justice Department officials have reviewed potential sedition charges against members of the Oath Keepers militia group who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, and they have been weighing whether to file them for weeks, according to law enforcement officials briefed on the deliberations.

The group members, including Thomas E. Caldwell, Jessica M. Watkins and Donovan Crowl, were indicted last month on charges of conspiring to obstruct Congress’s ability to certify President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.

The Justice Department has rarely brought charges of sedition, the crime of conspiring to overthrow the government, and has not successfully prosecuted such a case in more than 20 years.

The decision about how to move forward has languished while Justice Department leaders go through the Senate confirmation process. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was sworn in on March 11 and is likely to have final say over such a high-profile case.

Law enforcement officials have given senior officials in the Justice Department’s National Security Division potential evidence that they had gathered about the trio and an analysis of whether those facts supported a sedition charge, but they stopped short of delivering a more formal prosecution memo or a draft of an indictment, one of the officials said.

In court documents, federal prosecutors said that the group of…