WASHINGTON — President Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race has left the Democratic campaign in chaos.
“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President,” Biden wrote in a statement.
The president endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in a post on X. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
The decision of who will replace Biden atop the party’s ticket will be made by the Democratic National Convention, but support was coalescing around Harris after Biden’s announcement.
Delegates are set to vote in just a few weeks at the convention, and could even vote earlier. There are a few names that have reliably surfaced as potential replacements in addition to Harris, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. But Newsom on Sunday evening endorsed Harris as the party’s nominee.
STAT reviewed each of these potential candidates’ records on health care. With experience in the Senate and White House for Harris, and as governors of states grappling with health care challenges for Newsom and Whitmer, there is no shortage of history to examine.
Ultimately, it will be the Democratic nominee’s decision whether they choose to build on President Biden’s health care legacy and work toward his campaign’s goals, such as expanding on his signature drug pricing reform law, or whether they’d prefer to chart a different, possibly more ambitious, course.
Vice President Kamala Harris
The path of least resistance for Democrats would be to nominate Harris.
During the presidential primary in 2020, Harris ran to the left of Biden on health care issues including health insurance reform and prescription drug pricing. Prior to campaigning for president, Harris represented California in the Senate and was the state’s attorney general.
She also has a strong record of advocacy on women’s health issues. While Biden held anti-abortion views in the past, Harris has been more consistent in supporting abortion access over time. She has often served as the face of the White House’s efforts to highlight the threats to access to abortions, IVF, and contraception following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
In the Senate, Harris championed preventing maternal mortality, and was the Senate lead on a major legislative effort to address the issue. She gave an interview to STAT that highlighted her views about how inequity in the health care system contributes to maternal mortality, and outlined what she viewed as the Biden administration’s accomplishments.
In the presidential primary, Harris pushed for more aggressive measures to curb prescription drug prices than Biden has pursued, including invoking “march-in rights” to allow competition on drugs developed using federal research. She, like former President Trump, has called for measures to ensure the United States doesn’t pay more for medications than other developed countries.
She also advocated for a transition to a Medicare for All system, albeit one that still maintained a role for private health insurance, while Biden pushed creating a public insurance option through the Affordable Care Act.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom
Newsom also has a long list of progressive health care accomplishments and proposals. On Sunday, he endorsed Harris as the party’s nominee.
One of his signature issues is drug prices. As California’s governor, Newsom created the CalRx initiative, under which California is contracting with generic drug companies to make medicines like insulin and the emergency overdose treatment Naloxone, and sell them at cost.
Although elusive, a single-payer health care system has been another longtime goal for Newsom, who has been California’s governor since 2019 and was previously the state’s lieutenant governor. Instead, Newsom has taken a step-wise approach toward universal coverage.
One of those steps combined health care and immigration policies. California was the first state to expand Medicaid benefits to low-income residents, regardless of their immigration status. However, months later he was criticized for proposing a budget-cutting measure that would eliminate a home-care benefit for people who are in the country without permission.
The governor also has sought to increase the minimum wage for health care workers while slowing the rise in health care costs. He signed a labor-backed law to hike the minimum wage to $25 for health care workers. Separately, state regulators under Newsom recently capped annual price hikes at 3% for doctors, hospitals, and health insurance companies in California, starting in 2029.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan
Abortion rights catapulted Whitmer to national prominence as states scrambled after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Michigan in 2022 voted by referendum to enshrine a right to abortion in the state’s constitution, and Whitmer, first elected governor in 2018, pushed in 2023 to build on that momentum.
Ultimately, the legislature passed a package of legislation that repealed regulations on abortion clinics, a law criminalizing prescribing mifepristone, and a law that required a separate insurance rider for abortion.
Mental health has been another of Whitmer’s priorities as governor. In May, she signed a law that requires insurers to cover treatment for mental health and substance use disorders at the same level as physical health services.
She also spearheaded a push in 2023 to codify various provisions of the Affordable Care Act in state law. These included provisions that prohibited insurers from denying coverage due to gender or pre-existing conditions, allowed dependents to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26, prohibited annual and lifetime coverage limits, required coverage of preventative care, and stopped insurers from rescinding coverage.
While much of her agenda on health care issues has hewed closely to the Affordable Care Act, one more ambitious policy she has proposed is paid family and medical leave. Democrats in Washington tried to pass paid leave guarantees, but the proposals were left on the cutting room floor due to opposition from the party’s moderates.
This story has been updated with President Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris as his replacement atop the Democratic ticket and with Newsom’s endorsement.