WASHINGTON — Vice President Harris says she wants to cancel billions of dollars in medical debt if elected president this fall.
The plan, unveiled Friday in a wide-ranging platform to cut Americans’ economic costs, is a longtime progressive policy goal. It eclipses a Biden administration initiative this June to exclude medical debt from credit reports, as well as previous Covid-19 relief funding aimed at clearing debt. However, erasing bills amounting to more than $200 billion across the U.S. would require unprecedented congressional and state government cooperation with the White House.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said in a statement that they would “work with states” on the plan “because no one should go bankrupt just because they had the misfortune of becoming sick or hurt.”
The Biden administration previously secured roughly $7 billion in the American Rescue Plan to clear medical debt for an estimated 3 million Americans. It is difficult to track the total amount Americans owe in health care bills, but government surveys indicate it could be at least $220 billion, according to a KFF analysis.
Harris also said Friday that she wants to speed up Medicare negotiation of drug prices, echoing President Biden’s remarks at this year’s State of the Union. It’s unclear exactly what she meant by speeding up the process. Currently, medications aren’t eligible for the negotiation process until they have been on the market for at least nine years or 13 years, depending on the type of drug. The negotiation process itself takes a couple years before prices go into effect.
She also proposed expanding popular provisions of Biden’s drug pricing reform that are currently limited to the Medicare program to all Americans, including capping insulin costs at $35 per month and limiting out-of-pocket spending on pharmacy drugs to $2,000 per year. Democrats tried to enact the expansions initially, but procedural hurdles stood in the way.
Current efforts to expand the reach of the insulin copay caps have paralyzed the Senate amid disagreements in part over whether the policy should apply to uninsured patients. Political pressure to resolve the issue has waned as Biden’s reforms went into effect and drugmakers expanded their own assistance programs.
Harris also took a shot at former President Trump in her platform, accusing him again of planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act and launch “Project 2025,” a conservative think tank agenda that the former president has sought to distance himself from in recent weeks.
Trump said this week he would “keep the Affordable Care Act, unless we can do something much better.” The stance partially walks back from Republicans’ repeated failure to repeal and replace the expansive law during his first administration.
“We’ll keep it, it stinks, it’s not good,” he said during a North Carolina rally. “If we can do something better, we’re going to do something with it.”
The Trump campaign blasted Harris’ plan in a statement, saying the platform proposed “socialist policies like price controls…and [Sen.] Bernie Sanders’ elimination of private healthcare.”
Harris unveiled the platform ahead of a rally, also in North Carolina, on Friday. It also lands days before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.