Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her economic agenda Friday, and much of her plan involves taking the health care accomplishments made by the Biden administration further.
Speaking in North Carolina, Harris vowed that under her administration, Medicare negotiations would continue and grow to encompass all Americans, not only Medicare beneficiaries.
“Just yesterday we announced that we are lowering the price by up to 80 percent for 10 more lifesaving drugs, and I pledge to continue this progress,” Harris said during a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C.
“I’ll lower the cost of insulin and prescription drugs for everyone, with your support, not only our seniors and 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,” she added.
President Biden counts Medicare negotiations and lowering insulin prices among his key health care achievements.
She not only leaned on her role in the administration but also her prior work as California’s attorney general.
“As attorney general in California I went after companies that illegally increased prices including wholesalers that inflated the price of prescription medication,” Harris said.
Earlier this year, the administration announced it was moving forward with plans to ban medical debt from credit reports, an initiative Harris was the face of. The Democratic presidential nominee vowed Thursday she would work to eliminate medical debt altogether.
“I will work as president with states like here in North Carolina — Roy Cooper thank you again — to cancel medical debt for more and more millions more Americans,” she said, noting North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) medical debt relief plan that was approved last month.
Cooper was among the politicians considered to be likely picks for Harris’s running mate before Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) officially joined the ticket.
The vice president also put distance between herself and former President Trump repeating her oft-said warning that he would seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) if reelected.
“As for Donald Trump, well he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act which 45 million Americans rely on. 45 million Americans rely on it for health care,” she said. “That would take us back to a time when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions. We all remember what that was and we’re not going back.”
“Remember he tried to cut Medicare every year he was President, threatening a program that tens of millions of seniors count on,” Harris continued. “And according to his Project 2025 agenda, he intends to undo our work to bring down prescription drugs the cost of prescription drugs and Insulin cost. Well, we’ve come too far to let that happen.”
Trump has said he no longer plans to repeal the ACA, instead saying he would make it “much better than it is right now.” He also promised to not touch Medicare or Social Security earlier this year after landing in hot water when he said “there is a lot you can do” in terms of cutting funding to those programs.
The former president criticized Harris’s plans for health care, saying Thursday that she would create a “communist system.”
“You’re going to be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care. It’s — you wait for your doctor like 10 months, 12 months, 11 months,” Trump said during a speech from his New Jersey golf resort. “You got to see some of these plans, how they work in other countries, it’s disgraceful. So private health care is gone. She wants it out.”
“She co-sponsored legislation to abolish very popular private health insurance, which 150 Americans rely on, dumping everyone onto inferior socialist government-run health care systems with rationing and deadly wait times while massively raising your taxes,” he added.