Kamala Harris releases report on Donald Trump’s health care plan

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign just released a new health care plan.

It’s not her own plan, because she published this already in the context of the broader economic context agenda she revealed for the first time end of summer.

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

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

He said he still wants to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, for example, although he hasn’t specified how. In his September debate with Harris, he said he only had “notions of a plan.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-Ohio), noted Recently, Republicans have attempted to pursue a “deregulatory agenda” that, among other things, would not place people “in the same insurance pools.”

It’s the same language Republicans used to describe their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare,” in 2017, when Trump was in office and spent most of his first year trying to get rid of the law.

This effort failed and caused a strong political reactionlargely because of projections suggesting the number of uninsured Americans would increase by more than 10, 20 or even 30 million people under the bill.

The aim of Monday’s document from the Harris campaign is to remind people that Trump has already tried to repeal – and may try again – a threat to access to health care for the tens of millions of people who now rely on the Affordable Care Act.

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

“They may not want Americans to see the details of their plan, but Vice President Harris and Governor Walz won’t let them hide its effects,” said Brian Nelson, senior policy adviser to the Harris campaign. , in a press release provided to the media before the publication of Monday’s newspaper. “The new report our campaign is releasing today exposes for the first time what their plan really is and how it would increase costs and eliminate peace of mind for millions of Americans.”

THE Affordable Care Actwidely considered the signature domestic policy achievement of the Obama era, expanded eligibility for Medicaid, the government insurance program for low-income Americans. It also prohibits private insurers from raising premiums, selling limited policies or denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

That last part made private insurance more expensive in some cases, because it meant insurers could no longer avoid covering 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 compromise it didn’t work good for some Americans – and has not reached others – which is one reason why, even today, large numbers of Americans struggle with health care costs. But the proportion of Americans without insurance is at least historic lowswhile access to care, financial security and health care have improvedaccording to a large and ever-growing body of academic research.

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

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

Harris’ new campaign report attempts to show what a Trump-led repeal effort might look like today, extrapolating from sources including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the nonpartisan organization KFF.

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

The document also notes that rural hospitals could suffer, as many rely on expanded Medicaid funding to cover their expenses.

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

One of the most notable Democratic achievements of the Biden era has been a package of measures aimed at reduce the price of prescription drugsenacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

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

Trump has said he wants to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, as do Republican members of Congress – and candidates for – Congress across the country. And although he did not specify whether this included provisions of the Prescription Drug Act, conservative documents like Project 2025, the right-wing government agenda proposed by the Heritage Foundation, have proposed repealing these provisions.

The conservative argument against these reforms is that they arbitrarily set lower prices for drugs, thereby reducing revenues that fund research and development of better treatments. The liberal argument for these reforms is that drug companies are exploiting existing laws to raise prices in ways that don’t actually lead to better research, which the public already funds through government grants.

Harris favors the latter argument and has actually proposed expanding existing authority to cover more drugs for more people. She also wants to renew some temporary increases in financial assistance for people purchasing insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

This is much less likely if Republicans gain power, because they oppose additional government spending, just as they have always opposed the Affordable Care Act.

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