Harris leans into health care in race against Trump

Vice President Harris is putting health care front and center in the campaign with a month to go before the election, looking to repeat past Democratic successes.  

Abortion has been the primary health issue for much of the campaign, but Harris is reopening Democrats’ 2018 playbook, when they took control of the House in a “blue wave” in large part by elevating threats to ObamaCare and painting former President Trump as an existential risk to their economic and health security. 

“Together, Tim Walz and I will strengthen the Affordable Care Act, continue to take on Big Pharma, and cap the cost of prescription medication for all Americans,” Harris wrote Monday in a post on the social platform X.  

“Because we believe that health care should be a right — not just a privilege for those who can afford it. “ 

Harris’s campaign has gone on the offensive in the past week. They released a lengthy report slamming the Trump camp’s “plans” for the law, followed by a major ad blitz.  

As part of the rollout, the Harris campaign cited a Gallup poll that found two-thirds of surveyed Americans felt health care was not getting enough attention from either political party.  

Democrats and independents were more likely than Republican respondents to say health care is not receiving enough attention, though even 53 percent of GOP voters said the candidates could focus on it more.  

The Harris ads focused on Trump’s words, as well as Harris’s accomplishments. 

A one-minute-long ad attacked former President Trump over his calls to replace the law with vague “concepts of a plan” that have never been released, and touted Harris’s efforts to lower the costs of prescription drugs by capping insulin copay costs at $35 a vial for Medicare beneficiaries and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. 

A separate ad featured a Wisconsin dairy farmer with a brain tumor who credits the Affordable Care Act for saving her life.  

“Trump is coming for our health care,” Tina Hinchley says in the ad. “That’s pretty damn scary.” 

In a statement, the Trump campaign pushed back on Harris’s assertions. 

“Kamala Harris is lying because she is losing. President Trump is not running to terminate the Affordable Care Act — he is running to make healthcare affordable again by increasing transparency, promoting choice and competition, and expanding access to new affordable healthcare and prescription drug options,” said Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson. 

“President Trump will keep his promise to make America affordable and healthy again when we elect him in November,” she added.  

Ever since the Trump administration and congressional Republicans failed to repeal ObamaCare, the law and health care in general have consistently been winning issues for Democrats. 

When Harris made her first joint appearance with President Biden after he decided not to run for reelection, it was at an event touting the release of the first Medicare-negotiated drug prices, a policy included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). 

“I was proud to cast the tiebreaking vote that sent the bill that gave Medicare the power to negotiate and let it get to the president’s desk,” Harris said at the event.   

Leslie Dach, founder and chair of the Democratic-aligned advocacy group Protect Our Care, said health care is a universal issue.  

“When someone in your family is sick or you’re sick, you know it takes over your life. Every American has felt that anxiety,” Dach said.  

Harris’s campaign unveiled policy positions in early September, including a pledge to “make affordable health care a right, not a privilege by expanding and strengthening the Affordable Care Act.”     

Harris said she wants to make the law’s temporary enhanced subsidies permanent. Millions of enrollees have come to rely on the enhanced subsidies, and they’ve helped boost health insurance enrollment to record levels.     

She also pledged to extend the IRA’s $35 cap on insulin and $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket spending for seniors to all Americans. 

Dach noted that while Harris and even Biden have touted health wins for their administration, the message about the danger from Republicans became more pointed when Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) opened the door to criticism.  

“Trump and Vance … made this very, very real to the American public,” Dach said. “The differences couldn’t be clearer. So that makes it a straightforward thing to talk to the American people about. There isn’t a lot of nuance here, and it has a history.” 

Early in the campaign, Trump revived his previous calls for repealing the law and replacing it with something better. Senate Republicans were quick to shut down any talk of bringing up repeal efforts again, even if they were to control the government.    

When pressed by ABC moderators during the debate, Trump acknowledged that he doesn’t currently have a plan to replace ObamaCare if it were repealed, only “concepts of a plan.”    

In the absence of an official plan from the top of the ticket, Vance has tried to fill in some of the details.    

Vance has said Trump’s health plan would focus on deregulating the insurance markets to promote choice and “not have a one-size-fits-all approach” of putting everyone into the same insurance risk pool.   

Vance described the same “high-risk pools” championed by conservatives in the House when they were crafting an ObamaCare replacement bill in 2017.     

A spokesperson for Vance previously said the senator “was simply talking about the significant improvements President Trump made to the Affordable Care Act through his deregulatory approach, which aimed to bring down the cost of premiums while ensuring coverage for pre-existing conditions.” 

The Affordable Care Act forces insurance companies to cover everybody the same, regardless of their medical condition or risk.   

“We want to keep those regulations in place, but we also want to make the health insurance marketplace function a little bit better,” Vance said during the CBS vice presidential debate.  

After the debate ended, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told NBC News in the “spin room” that Senate Republicans were interested in a health care overhaul. His language echoed Vance’s.  

“We’ll have an opportunity next year, when it comes time to extend the Trump tax cuts, to adopt new policies that again will make health care more affordable and more personalized,” Cotton said.  

The Harris campaign has been more than happy to take up the fight.  

“If Trump takes power, he promises to put health care for working families on the chopping block, just so he can give tax handouts to his billionaire donors.” Harris-Walz spokesperson Joseph Costello said in a statement.