Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the 2024 presidential election after President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing her.
Harris has expressed many of the same views as Biden on health care issues, including abortion access and lowering prescription drug prices, both during her campaign against Biden for her party’s presidential nomination in the last general election and as Biden’s vice president.
However, on the issue of health care, Harris has veered to the left of Biden and called for a transition to a single-payer system, which Biden has not endorsed.
“We can go back to 2019 and get a sense of what she’s thinking, but she’s been in an administration for four years now,” Dan Mallinson, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg, told ABC News. “So she’s going to have to think about how she differentiates herself, right? By saying, ‘This is who I’m going to be as president,’ but also by not undermining the work that was done in the previous administration, so she’s still tied to that.”
Here is Kamala Harris’ position on various health care issues:
Single-payer health care system
Harris has previously expressed support for a single-payer health care system, sometimes called “Medicare for All.”
Although she initially indicated during a 2019 presidential campaign debate that she would support eliminating private health insurance, Harris backtracked and instead unveiled her own health plan. It called for expanding Medicare to all Americans and implementing a 10-year transition period that would automatically enroll newborns and the uninsured, give doctors time to integrate into the system, and help employers choose among federally designated programs.
The plan also preserves a role for private insurance companies, allowing Americans to choose whether to get health insurance through the government-funded Medicare plan or through a Medicare plan offered by a private insurer.
“I understand that this is another area where she’s a little bit more progressive than the president, in that she supports the Affordable Care Act and the expansion that came out of it, but she’s one of those who argues that the next step would be to provide this kind of Medicare for All idea, or a public option,” Mallinson said. “It’s less clear that that has broad enough political support, even within the Democratic Party.”
Biden had previously hinted that he would veto a Medicare-for-All bill, arguing that it would raise taxes on the middle class. Instead, he focused on strengthening the Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama when Biden was his vice president.
Reproductive rights
Like the president, Harris has been a vocal advocate for abortion rights and criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending federally protected abortion rights.
Biden and Harris have both said they make protecting reproductive freedoms a priority, with Harris saying, “To truly protect reproductive freedoms, we must restore the protections of Roe.”
However, Harris has been more amplified in her support for reproductive rights, becoming the first vice president to visit a clinic run by Planned Parenthood and criticizing Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance for apparently supporting a national abortion ban and blocking protections for in vitro fertilization.
Additionally, Harris said during a town hall on MSNBC in May 2019 that, if elected president, she would require any state laws that limit reproductive freedoms to be approved by the Justice Department before being signed into law.
“Biden, who has a strong Catholic background, had been much more moderate on the issue of reproductive rights, but he became much more vocal after Roe v. Wade was overturned,” Mallinson said. “But Kamala Harris, on the other hand, had a much stronger profile on reproductive rights and was a much more vocal advocate, and I think she’ll be in the campaign as well.”
Reducing the cost of prescription drugs
Biden and Harris also agreed to lower health care costs. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the cost of insulin was capped at $35 per month for many Americans, and the federal government began direct negotiations on prices for 10 widely used drugs funded by Medicare Part D, with plans to add more drugs to the list in the future.
As a candidate in 2019, Harris also supported a plan to allow the Department of Health and Human Services to set new price caps for all drugs sold in the United States, based on prices in other developed countries for the same drugs.
Additionally, if Congress refuses to pass a law to lower the cost of prescription drugs, Harris proposed a possible executive action that would require a report on drug companies that are selling drugs at high prices. Those companies would then be warned to lower their prices, and if they don’t, a cheaper competitor would be introduced.
Mallinson said that if Harris becomes president, she would likely try to expand both efforts to lower prescription drug costs and negotiations to cover more drugs. However, Mallinson said he was unsure whether Harris would be able to carry out the executive actions detailed in her 2019 plan.
“Both former President Trump and President Biden made a lot of promises about executive actions, but it’s hard to keep them,” he said. “Also, what a lot of people don’t understand is that the president can’t change anything through an executive order. They’re not kings and queens. These orders only allow them to make changes that are already within their authority as an executive branch in a certain area.”
