Vice President Kamala Harris, who has said she will seek the Democratic nomination after President Biden decided not to continue his reelection campaign, has previously staked out health care positions to the left of President Biden.
But there is not expected to be much light between his policy priorities and those of President Biden.
Harris will be able to claim ownership of Biden’s health care victories — like a $35 insulin limit, Medicare drug price negotiations and a direct cap on Medicare drug coverage — while also being a much stronger messenger. stronger than Biden has been.
“It’s the Biden-Harris administration. And they worked together on these issues the entire time he was president,” said Debbie Curtis, vice president of consultancy McDermott+. “One hundred percent no air there.”
Here’s where Harris stands on key health issues:
Abortion
Abortion is one of Democrats’ strongest issues, but Biden has not been the most consistent messenger given his complicated views on the issue.
In contrast, Harris has established herself as the Democrats’ leading defender of abortion rights, defending them vigorously. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Harris crisscrossed the country, visiting red, blue and swing states to meet with activists, providers and women affected by abortion bans.
She was the first vice president to visit an abortion provider, and abortion rights groups lined up to support her after Biden announced he was no longer running.
“At a time when Republicans have launched a full-scale attack on our reproductive rights, an issue that will be the driving force for Democratic victories, Vice President Harris is our most powerful advocate and messenger on this issue,” said the president from EMILY’s List, Jessica Mackler. she said in a statement.
When she was running for president in 2019, Harris promised to place more federal barriers around abortion access, requiring states with a history of restrictions to request authorization from the Justice Department before enacting any new abortion laws.
She wasendorsed by pro-abortion groupswhen he ran for California attorney general in 2010 and maintained strong ties to these organizations in the years that followed.
ObamaCare
While running against Biden in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris tried to present herself as somewhere between moderates like Biden and progressives like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
She supported the Medicare for All bill introduced by Sanders, but also supported a number of moderate alternatives, including a “private option” plan that would transition to Medicare for All by allowing private insurance plans to compete with public plans. .
This apparent indecision in choosing a path generated criticism from other candidates and helped to condemn his candidacy.
Still, experts agree that she is a strong supporter of expanding ObamaCare and making health care more affordable for millions of Americans — something that will likely be one of the biggest health care fights in Congress in 2025.
“Harris’s past support for Medicare for All with a private insurance option hints at her values, but I doubt that will be a major emphasis for her in the current campaign,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president of health policy at KFF, an organization health research nonprofit, said in an email.
“I think Harris will lean much more heavily on the Biden-Harris record on health care than on the policies she proposed in the 2019 primaries. The political and political context has changed a lot since 2019,” Levitt said.
Medicine prices
As a presidential candidate, Harris wanted to go further than Biden on drug prices, capping U.S. prices at the lowest negotiated by other countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom.
Democrats in 2019 were mostly aligned on lowering drug prices with then-President Trump, who wanted to ensure that Americans didn’t pay more for the same drugs as people in other countries.
Harris also endorsed “walk-in” rights, which would allow the government to seize patents on high-priced drugs developed based on federal research to make them more affordable and increase competition.
Progressives have long insisted that the U.S. has the authority to take such steps, but the Biden administration has been reluctant to do so.
Healthcare costs
As California’s attorney general, Harris focused on health care consolidation and clashed with large insurance companies, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. Its track record indicates that it is not afraid to aggressively use antitrust laws to prevent companies from increasing costs due to anticompetitive behavior.
Under Harris’ leadership, California joined the U.S. Department of Justice in filing a civil antitrust lawsuit to block the proposed $54 billion merger of insurers Anthem and Cigna to create the world’s largest company. of health insurance in the country.
She also won multimillion-dollar settlements from major healthcare companies like Quest Diagnostics and McKesson, which were the subject of whistleblower lawsuits accusing them of Medicaid fraud.
As vice president, Harris took the lead on the administration’s medical debt initiatives. Earlier this year, it announced a new set of rules that bans medical debt from credit reports.
“No one should be denied access to economic opportunities simply because they experience a medical emergency,” Harris said at the time.
Other federal efforts to reduce medical debt include the No Surprises Act, which took effect in July 2022 and prohibits surprise billing for most emergency services and non-emergency services performed out of network.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
