(C) Common Dreams
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Kamala Harris Could Be America’s Health Care President - The New York Times [1]
['Jacob S. Hacker']
Date: 2024-08-14
From the moment Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Republicans have sought to paint her as a far-left California liberal. After all, they argue, she supported getting rid of private health insurance in her 2019 presidential campaign.
But Ms. Harris didn’t seek to eliminate private insurance in 2019. The core of her previous campaign’s health plan was an intelligently designed and politically astute public option — a more robust version of the Democratic approach embraced that year by Joe Biden (but one he never pursued after he took office). Essentially, she wanted to encourage Americans to buy into a revamped Medicare program that would give people the choice of public or private coverage.
As the so-called father of the public option, I feel confident in saying that Ms. Harris’s 2019 plan for a public option was — and remains — the strongest ever put forth by a presidential candidate. She shouldn’t run away from it. She should embrace it as a central part of her 2024 campaign both because it is smart policy and because it is smart politics.
Health care is “unbelievably complex,” as President Donald Trump remarked in 2017, as his party’s drive to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act headed for defeat. Americans hate a lot about the current semi-system — its high prices, its insecure coverage, its rapacious financial practices (and until 2017, they seemed fairly ambivalent about the A.C.A., too).
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/opinion/kamala-harris-health-care.html
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