WASHINGTON — Democrats have set the stage for a convention this week packed with boasts about some of their most popular health care policy wins and future moonshot goals.
The four-day event in Chicago will kick off as former President Trump increases attacks on rising inflation, economic hardship, and border control policies under the Biden administration. The Republican candidate has not dwelled much on health care in his campaign rhetoric. But Democrats see topics from reproductive rights to lower drug prices as winning issues with voters.
Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, will speak Thursday night, after a rumored performance by Beyoncé. In the days preceding, expect a procession of high-profile Democrats including vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, and a good number of the “white dudes” who made it on Harris’ VP shortlist.
Here are the top health care issues Democrats will likely highlight.
Negotiated drug prices
The first batch of Medicare-negotiated drug prices landed Thursday, providing a perfect takeoff point for DNC speakers to talk about the Biden administration’s efforts to lower drug costs — and where Harris fits in the picture.
Already, President Biden, Harris, and other administration officials have highlighted the fact that the vice president cast the “tie-breaking” vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping law that allowed Medicare to directly bargain with pharmaceutical companies for lower prices on commonly used medications.
The prices for the first 10 drugs will not go into effect until 2026, but Harris is already launching plans to “accelerate the speed of negotiations so the prices of more drugs come down faster,” according to the presidential platform announced by her campaign Friday. It is unclear how Harris would do that as president, considering the IRA lays out ground rules for the negotiation process and how it will broaden over subsequent years. But her plans echo comments Biden made in his State of the Union address this year.
“My entire career, I’ve worked to hold bad actors accountable and lower the cost of prescription drugs,” Harris told attendees at a Maryland event Thursday celebrating the negotiated drug costs. As California attorney general, she joined a fraud suit against GSK; the state received $3 billion in the settlement.
There are still lingering questions about the savings Medicare enrollees could see from the negotiated-price plan. At the DNC, expect Harris and other administration officials to champion those prices along with other, somewhat easier-to-understand aspects of the IRA, such as insulin price caps and out-of-pocket spending limits. The vice president’s platform pledges that, if elected, she will work to “cap the cost of insulin at $35 and out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs at $2,000 for everyone, not just seniors.” Doing so would require congressional cooperation — and maybe even another tie-breaking vote from her own vice president.
Abortion rights
Harris and other Democrats have hammered the Trump campaign on reproductive rights messaging, and this coming week will be no different. The issue gained more momentum recently when Trump’s remarks at a press conference seemingly left the door open to restricting access to the abortion pill mifepristone, a stance his campaign later denied, saying that Trump had not heard the question correctly.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance did not help matters when CBS asked him to elaborate on the campaign’s mifepristone stance, saying, “You, of course, want to make sure that any medicine is safe, that it is prescribed in the right way, and so forth.” The comments suggested that a future Trump administration could reinstitute mail-order restrictions and implement other prescribing barriers.
Those comments provided fresh ammunition for the Harris campaign, which has repeatedly pointed to a conservative think tank’s “Project 2025” plan to argue that Trump would instate a national abortion ban. Trump himself has insisted that he wants to leave the issue to states, but that message does not appear to be resonating with voters, a majority of whom believe that striking down Roe was wrong, according to national polling.
The reproductive rights debate is also an arena where Harris, and her surrogates, can speak directly to her advocacy. As vice president, she became the administration’s public face on efforts to shore up abortion rights and fight mifepristone limits. She also was the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic.
Medical debt
Harris nodded to the progressive wing of the party with a new platform pledging to clear billions of dollars in medical debt if she is elected president. The stance, however politically unfeasible, steps far beyond a Biden plan announced just months ago to exclude medical debt from credit reports — and an American Rescue Plan relief package that erased $7 billion in medical bills.
Total medical debt in the country is estimated at more than $220 billion, though it is difficult to pin down just how much the average American faces. The campaign also provided little detail as to how Harris would crush billions in medical bills, though it said her administration would “work with states” on the plan.
“No one should go bankrupt just because they had the misfortune of becoming sick or hurt,” Harris and Walz said in a campaign statement.
The issue is likely to resonate with voters listening to DNC speeches this week. Eighty-one percent of voters say medical debt relief is important, according to recent polling.
Progressive groups are warily supportive of the new plans.
The medical debt proposal — and efforts to accelerate price negotiation — “are critical first steps,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of grassroots advocacy group Our Revolution in a statement. “But the progressive movement will be watching closely to ensure these policies are not only enacted but rigorously enforced to deliver the meaningful change that Americans desperately need.”
The fate of Obamacare
Democrats will also blast Trump on Republicans’ failed fight to repeal and replace the expansive and broadly popular Affordable Care Act. Harris nodded to this in the platform released Friday as well, warning that Trump intends to revisit the battle and eliminate the law, which besides setting up the ACA marketplace also set up protections for covering preexisting conditions and introduced essential coverage requirements.
Trump has insisted this year that he does not want to revisit the repeal battle, but wants to improve the law. During a rally last week, he said he would “keep the Affordable Care Act, unless we can do something much better.”
Public support for the Affordable Care Act rose steadily during the repeal-and-replace fight, according to Gallup. A majority of voters still favored the law this year, with many ranking it a very important issue, per KFF.
Biden previewed the likely DNC talking points during the Maryland event last week. “My predecessor and his MAGA friends in Congress tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act … over 50 times,” he claimed. “We stopped them.”
Medicaid
Trump has pledged not to “cut a penny” from Medicare and Social Security programs, reflecting their broad popularity — and the fomenting concerns over House Republicans’ reform plans, including raised ages of eligibility.
But the former president has said very little about what he plans to do with Medicaid in a second term, providing an opportunity for Democrats to criticize his record this week. During his first administration, the Medicaid program allowed states to implement work requirements and explored issuing block grants that would overhaul spending and cap federal funding.
Expanded Medicaid coverage is a topic many swing-state Democrats see as a winning issue with voters. In North Carolina, where both Harris and Trump have rallied repeatedly, Gov. Roy Cooper — once a candidate on Harris’ VP shortlist — signed expansion into law just last year. There are ten holdout states that largely vote Republican.
States’ Medicaid rolls have also undergone dramatic shifts in the past year as some booted millions of enrollees off coverage after the coronavirus emergency order ended. The ACA marketplace saw record enrollment numbers during that time, but federal data this year shows uninsured rates are rising again.
As chair of the Democratic Governors Association, Harris’ running mate Walz is primed to attack GOP-majority states, and Trump, on Medicaid coverage.
“GOP extremists continue to threaten the progress we have made, blocking Medicaid expansion in the states and still trying to gut the health care law at the federal level,” he said in a DGA statement earlier this year that also name-checked Cooper’s progress in North Carolina.
