Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee in the wake of President Joe Biden stepping down this summer, vice president Kamala Harris has had to craft her own campaign in an ultra-abbreviated timeline, leaving her with few opportunities to share how she’d lead the nation if elected. That changes in a big way tonight, September 10, when she’ll debate former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
It’ll be a prime opportunity for Harris to clarify her stance on touchstone issues, including several crucial ones that revolve around health and health care. Indeed, nearly 60% of Americans view health care costs as a “very big problem,” and a record-high 32% of US voters are only willing to vote for a candidate who aligns with their views on abortion.
While Harris is bound to paint a fresh picture of her health-related proposals, there’s little mystery about where she stands. On September 9, she released her top-line viewpoints on various policy issues in a plan called A New Way Forward. Plus, she’s been in the political game for some time, playing a key role in the passage of health-impacting laws and speaking publicly about health issues during her 3.5 years as vice president (and before that, as a US senator, the attorney general of California, and the district attorney of San Francisco). Keep reading to brush up on what Harris has done or committed to in six crucial areas of health policy.
Read where Donald Trump stands on these health issues here.
Health care costsMedical debtReproductive rightsGun violenceCOVID-19Paid leaveHealth care costs
You may have heard some chatter about Harris flip-flopping on who should pay for health care (the government, à la universal health care, or a variety of entities, including private insurance companies). And her vision has indeed morphed over the years: In 2017, as a US senator for California, Harris cosponsored Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan—a proposal for government-backed health care—and in 2019, when she first campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination, she was one of two candidates who raised their hands during a primary debate to signal that she’d get rid of private health insurance. The waffle? She backtracked shortly after and released a proposal that would slowly expand Medicare while still allowing private insurers to offer plans, so long as they abided by certain rules.
As for what her health care plan is now? It’s still a bit vague, but we know that cutting costs will be a key piece of it. In her New Way Forward, she’s committed to strengthening the Affordable Care Act and extending the enhanced Biden-era tax credits that have substantially reduced health care premiums. Just last month, the Biden-Harris administration also announced lower prices for 10 popular, costly drugs (some of which treat conditions like heart disease and cancer) for folks covered by Medicare, thanks to a 2022 law granting Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices; that same legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, also capped the price of insulin at $35 a month and out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $2,000 a year for seniors. And in laying out her economic plan during her first policy speech as the Democratic presidential nominee in August, Harris pledged to “continue this progress” by locking in similar cost cuts for “everyone…not only our seniors.” (She has reiterated this promise in her policy plan, adding that she’ll also fast-track price negotiations for additional drugs.)
In the same speech, Harris also said she would “demand transparency from the middlemen who operate between Big Pharma and the insurance companies, who use opaque practices to raise your drug prices and profit off your need for medicine.” And there’s no reason to think she’d shy away from a fight: As attorney general of California, Harris investigated several drugmakers for illegal marketing and inflated pricing, ultimately winning tens of millions of dollars in settlements. And she joined forces with other attorneys general to block the merger of massive health insurance companies Anthem and Cigna, which, as she referenced in a 2023 speech, “could’ve resulted in increased cost for their patients.”
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Medical debt
In line with her stance on dropping health care costs, Harris is keen on erasing medical debt (a burden affecting about a third of Americans) and eliminating its far-reaching impacts, which, for some folks, may include worse mental health and choosing to put off or avoid getting care for medical issues. Throughout her tenure as VP, she’s shepherded initiatives to help limit “predatory” (read: harassing) debt collection practices and ramp up educational resources that assist folks in navigating confusing medical bills. And she’s also backed efforts to outright forgive medical debt with funds from the American Rescue Plan—which is on track to relieve $7 billion of that debt for 3 million people by 2026.
But perhaps Harris’s strongest advocacy in this arena is her June proposal to prohibit this debt from being included in credit reports. As she said in a press call tied to the announcement, “Medical debt makes it more difficult for millions of Americans to be approved for a car loan, a home loan, or a small-business loan, all of which, in turn, makes it more difficult to just get by, much less get ahead.” And as Harris noted in the same press call, all of this fallout is totally unfair, given that you often cannot anticipate a costly medical emergency (and so could wind up indebted even if you are financially responsible). In fact, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analysis found that having medical debt is not a good indicator of whether you will or won’t repay a loan.
The new proposal would build on voluntary actions that three big credit agencies have taken in recent years to nix medical debt that is less than a year old, has been paid off, or is under $500 from reporting. But ideally, as Harris would have it, all medical debt would be excluded from credit reports because “no one should be denied economic opportunity because of a medical emergency.”
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Reproductive rights
There’s no health issue on which Harris’s stance is clearer than on reproductive freedom. Her take? We should all very much have it. Meaning, she’s pro people doing whatever they damn well please with their bodies, whether that means having an abortion, taking birth control or emergency contraception, or getting fertility treatments. On the topic of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), in particular, Harris has called the legal limitations prompted by an Alabama Supreme Court ruling this year “outrageous,” and she emphasized the value in having the freedom to start a family when and how you choose.
During multiple recent appearances, Harris also criticized the Dobbs ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion and bemoaned the aftermath of tattered access to that care, while affirming that she’ll “fight for a woman’s right to choose.” This spring, Harris became the first vice president to publicly visit an abortion provider—a Planned Parenthood in Minnesota, with her now running mate Tim Walz, another champion for reproductive justice. And in her policy plan, she has explicitly promised to “never allow a national abortion ban to become law.” No wonder several reproductive-rights orgs (like Reproductive Freedom for All and Emily’s List) have endorsed her campaign.
This month, Harris kicked off a nationwide 50-stop “reproductive freedom bus tour” in Florida. With speeches from Harris and Walz, as well as Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, Walz’s wife Gwen, and reproductive rights advocates, the tour aims to highlight Harris’s goal of restoring Roe v. Wade’s protections while painting a clear contrast between her vision to increase bodily autonomy and the Trump Administration’s history of restricting it.
And she’s not just talking the talk; Harris’s stance rests on a legacy of action. As a senator, she cosponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would ban states from creating requirements that make abortion care tougher to access. Before that, as California’s attorney general, she prosecuted an anti-abortion activist who allegedly illegally recorded conversations at a Planned Parenthood, and she also sponsored a bill that sought to regulate crisis pregnancy centers (which are known to persuade people not to get abortions based on medically inaccurate counseling).
As Harris has shared, her motivation is deeply personal: In high school, she learned that her best friend was being molested. “So the idea that someone who survives a crime of violence to their body would not have the authority to make a decision about what happens to their body next, that’s immoral,” she told a crowd in Jacksonville, Florida, in May.
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Gun violence
Ensuring “the freedom to live safe from the terror of gun violence,” as Harris put it at her first campaign event this year, is a major priority for her. Arguably among her most impressive accomplishments as VP is working with President Biden in 2022 to pass the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), which, among a ton of efforts to diminish the consistent threat of gun violence, strengthened background-check requirements, made straw purchasing (buying a gun for someone who legally cannot) a crime, sought to remove guns from the hands of those who’d committed domestic violence, and provided tens of millions in grant funding to ramp up school security.
And when Biden created the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention shortly after, he chose Harris to oversee it. Since then, she’s worked closely with Biden to put aspects of the BSCA into practice, like collaborating with the Department of Justice to clarify when a person has to get a license to sell guns and conduct background checks. And this year, during a visit to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (the site of the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting in 2018), Harris announced the launch of a federal resource center to help with the implementation of Extreme Risk or “red flag” laws (which allow a judge to temporarily seize a gun from a person who may be a threat to themselves or others).
But that’s just the recent stuff. Before her VP days, Harris cosponsored legislation as a senator to help survivors of gun violence get support, regulate dangerous firearm accessories (like those that make it easier to fire more rounds more quickly), and prohibit people convicted of violent hate crimes from possessing guns. It’s a record that’s handily earned her the endorsement of a coalition of gun-safety groups.
What her stance is not, however, is explicitly anti-gun; in fact, like Walz (who has shared that he’s a hunter), Harris personally owns a gun—reportedly, a handgun “for personal safety” that she keeps locked up. What she stands for, instead, are solutions that keep guns “out of the hands of people in crisis.” In that realm, she said in a campaign speech that she’ll pass universal background checks, “red flag” laws, and an assault weapons ban if elected.
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COVID-19
You probably haven’t heard much in the way of COVID-related policy or politicking recently… and that’s on purpose. Recent public-interest polling shows the majority (nearly 80%) of Americans aren’t very or at all worried about getting COVID—and when the collective consciousness shifts away from an issue, often so do politicians. Even reports of infections “running rampant” at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions didn’t garner official campaign responses. And Harris didn’t so much as mention the pandemic in her DNC address on August 22 or in her New Way Forward policy plan.
The reality, however, is that COVID is far from gone; cases have been spiking big-time this summer amid the appearance of new variants, and contracting the virus has left millions with debilitating symptoms of long COVID and at higher risk of mental health problems; meanwhile, immunocompromised folks have no choice but to risk their lives—and even face criticism or straight-up hate for wearing a mask in public—or stay isolated absent any remaining public health policy.
Despite the current silence, COVID is an issue Harris has taken steps to address as VP: In addition to collaborating with Biden on a seven-point plan to combat the virus in 2021 (which included providing access to free testing, ramping up production of face masks and other personal protective equipment, investing $25 billion in a vaccine manufacturing and distribution plan, and restoring the relationship Trump squashed with the World Health Organization), Harris has spoken at multiple global COVID-19 summits. In 2021, she advocated for the creation of an international pandemic preparedness fund and announced that the US was prepared to contribute $250 million to kick it off. And the following year, she encouraged global cooperation to ensure everyone has “access to life-saving vaccines, tests, and therapeutics.”
Also worth noting: The Biden-Harris administration has launched a response to long COVID, specifically funneling resources toward research, as well as expanding care for folks with the condition and education for medical providers. That said, advocates have since pointed to a lack of social recognition for the condition and a drop-off in funding for it in Biden’s budget request for the National Institutes of Health in 2025—and it’s not clear if Harris plans to address either concern.
A couple bright spots: In August, the government announced it would restart the free COVID test program in September, allowing everyone to request four free at-home tests online or over the phone; and updated COVID vaccines have been rolled out nationwide.
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Paid leave
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say Harris is the most pro-paid leave presidential candidate…ever. She made her biggest statement on the issue during her first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, when she put forth a proposal for six months of paid family and medical leave; to be clear about just how ambitious that is, that’s double the amount of time currently offered as unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). She later championed Biden’s American Families Plan (part of the Build Back Better economic framework), which included 12 weeks of guaranteed paid parental, family, and sick leave. Though it failed to get congressional support, all signs point to Harris reviving the fight for paid leave if elected.
During a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, in July, Harris said: “We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every person can buy a home, start a family, and build wealth; and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” That last bit reflects her dedication to supporting parents and caregivers, not just in the first few months postpartum, but in the following years too. In the economic plan she revealed in August, Harris proposed an expanded child tax credit of up to $3,600 per child (up from the current $2,000), as well as $6,000 in tax relief for lower-income families during the first year of a newborn’s life. And in her New Way Forward, she pledged to fight for lower care costs, including that of “high-quality child care.”
Even Harris’s pick of Walz as a running mate is a strong signal of her family-focused priorities: As Minnesota governor, he signed into law the Midwest’s first paid leave program and expanded the state’s child tax credit to $1,750 per child (currently the highest in the country). What’s more, he’s even said paid leave should be the first thing passed if the Dems win. And Harris’s record is plenty indication that she’d make it a priority as well.
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Source : Self.com