Kamala Harris reports on Donald Trump’s healthcare agenda

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has just begun issued a new care plan.

It’s not her own plan, because she published already as part of the broader economy agenda she first revealed in late summer.

This time it’s Donald Trump’s health care plan — or, more precisely, what she and her team think Trump would try to implement if re-elected.

The exercise is necessary, Harris’ advisers say, because access to health care for many millions of Americans is at stake in the election, and Trump has sent confusing, sometimes contradictory signals about what he would do.

He has said he still wants to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, for example, though he has not specified how. In his September debate with Harris, he said he only “concepts of a plan.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-Ohio), has done just that indicated recently, Republicans are said to be trying to pursue a “deregulatory agenda” that would, among other things, not put people “into the same insurance pools.”

That’s the same language Republicans used to describe their plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” in 2017, when Trump was in office and spent most of his first year abolishing it. of the law.

That attempt failed and provoked a strong political responsenot least because of projections that suggest the number of Americans without insurance would rise by more than 10, 20, or even 30 million people, depending on the bill.

The point of Monday’s article about the Harris campaign is to remind people that Trump tried to repeal the law before — and could try again — threatening access to health care for the tens of millions now dependent on the Affordable Care Act.

Polls have repeatedly shown that such an effort could be even more unpopular than the last, although health care has received relatively little attention in the campaign until recently.

“They may not want Americans to see the details of their plan, but Vice President Harris and Governor Walz won’t let them get away with hiding its consequences,” Brian Nelson, a senior policy adviser for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. press release to the US government. media prior to Monday’s newspaper. “The new report our campaign is releasing today explains for the first time what their plan really is and how it would increase costs and take away peace of mind for millions of Americans.”

The Affordable Care Actgenerally regarded as the signature achievement of the domestic policy of the Obama eraexpanded eligibility for Medicaid, the government insurance program for low-income Americans. It also banned private insurers from raising premiums, selling limited policies or denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

This last part made private insurance more expensive in some cases, because it meant insurers could no longer avoid paying bills for people with serious medical needs. To offset these increases, the law provided subsidies in the form of tax credits worth hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per year.

The interaction It didn’t work good for some Americans – and not achieved for others – which is one reason why, even today, large numbers of Americans struggle with health care costs. But the percentage of Americans without insurance is up historic lowswhile access to care, financial security and health care do improvedaccording to a large and growing body of academic research.

Republicans argue that still leaves the country worse off — in part because they believe the combination of new government spending, regulations and taxes has made health care markets less efficient. Their 2017 repeal proposals would have been reversed the Affordable Care Act reforms, one way or another.

These bills would also have dramatically reduced government spending on health care, freeing up money that Republicans wanted to use to finance tax cuts that would have disproportionately benefited wealthy Americans.

The new Harris campaign report attempts to show what a Trump-led repeal effort might look like today, extrapolated from sources like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Servicesand the impartial organization, KFF.

In addition to tallying the number of people who could lose insurance, the report highlights the number of people with pre-existing conditions who could lose the protection of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance rules.

The paper also notes that rural hospitals could suffer because so many of them rely on funding from expanded Medicaid to cover their costs.

It’s not just the Affordable Care Act whose future could depend on the outcome of the election.

One of the signature Democratic achievements of the Biden era was a series of measures lower the price of prescription drugsestablished as part of the Inflation Reduction Act 2022.

The law gives the federal government the authority to negotiate directly with manufacturers to lower prices for certain expensive drugs available to seniors and people with disabilities through the Medicare program.

Trump has said he wants to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, as have Republican members of — and candidates for — Congress across the country. And while he did not specify whether this would include prescription drug provisions, conservative documents such as Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposed right-wing government agenda, have proposed repealing these provisions.

The conservative argument against these reforms is that they arbitrarily set lower drug prices, reducing the revenues that enable research and development of better treatments. The liberal argument for these reforms is that pharmaceutical companies are abusing existing laws to drive up prices in a way that does not actually lead to better research, which the public already funds with government subsidies.

Harris favors the latter argument and has actually proposed expanding the existing authority to include more medicines for more people. She also wants to extend some temporary increases in financial assistance for people who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

That is much less likely to happen if Republicans gain power because they object to the additional government spending, just as they have always objected to the Affordable Care Act.

With Monday’s release, the Harris campaign hopes more voters will learn about it.