(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris became the front-runner for the Democratic 2024 presidential nomination 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 access to abortion and lowering prescription drug prices, both while campaigning against Biden for their party’s presidential nomination during 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, something Biden has not endorsed.
“We can look back to 2019 and get an idea of what she views, but she also now has four years of being part of an administration,” 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 does she differentiate herself, right? As ‘This is who I’m going to be as president’ but also, she can’t kind of undermine the work that’s been done over the past administration, so she’s still connected to that.”
Here’s where Kamala Harris stands on various health care issues:
Single-payer health care system
Harris has previously expressed support for a single-payer health care system, sometimes referred to as “Medicare for All.”
Although she initially indicated during a 2019 presidential campaign debate that she would support eliminating private health insurance, Harris walked back her support and instead unveiled her own health care plan. It called for expanding Medicare access to all Americans and setting up a 10-year transition period that would automatically enroll newborns and the uninsured, allowing doctors time to enter the system and help employers choose from federally designated programs.
The plan also preserves a role for private insurance companies, allowing Americans the option to obtain health insurance through the public Medicare plan or through a Medicare plan offered by a private insurer.
“My understanding is this is another area where she is a bit more progressive than the president in that [she] is supportive of the Affordable Care Act and the expansion that occurred, but is among those who argue that a next step then would be to provide that kind of Medicare for All idea, or a public option,” Mallinson said. “Whether that has broad enough political support, even among and within the Democratic Party, is less clear.”
Biden has previously suggested he would veto a “Medicare for All” bill, arguing that it would raise taxes for the middle class. Instead, he has focused on strengthening the Affordable Care Act that was signed into law in 2010 by then-President Barack Obama, when Biden was his vice president.
Reproductive rights
Similar to the president, Harris has been an outspoken advocate for abortion rights and has criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federally protected right to abortion.
Both Biden and Harris have said they consider it a priority to protect reproductive freedoms, with Harris declaring, “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 candidate J.D. Vance for seemingly backing a national abortion ban and blocking protections for in-vitro fertilization.
Additionally, Harris said during an MSNBC town hall in May 2019 that, if elected president, she would require any state-passed law limiting reproductive freedoms to undergo approval from the Department of Justice before being enacted.
“Biden, having a strong Catholic background, had been much more moderate on the issue of reproductive rights, but [he] has become much more vocal after the overturning of Roe versus Wade,” Mallinson said. “But Kamala Harris, on the other hand, [had a] much stronger profile on reproductive rights and [was] a much stronger vocal advocate, and I think will be on the campaign as well.”
Lowering prescription drug costs
Biden and Harris have also been aligned on lowering health care costs. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the cost of insulin has been capped at $35 per month for many Americans, and the federal government has begun direct price negotiations on 10 widely used drugs paid for 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 authorizing the Department of Health and Human Services to set new price caps for all drugs sold in the U.S., based on prices charged in other developed countries for the same medications.
Additionally, if Congress declined to pass legislation to lower prescription drug costs, Harris proposed a potential executive action that would ask for a report on which pharmaceutical companies have drugs being sold at high prices. A warning would then be issued for those companies to lower their prices and, if they don’t, a lower-priced competitor would be placed on the market.
Mallinson said that if Harris does become president, she would likely attempt to expand both the effort to lower prescription drug costs and the negotiations to cover more drugs. However, Mallinson said he’s unsure if Harris would be able to exercise the executive actions detailed in her 2019 plan.
“You’ve seen both former President Trump, as well as President Biden, make a lot of promises about executive action, and then it’s actually difficult to follow through on that,” he said. “And also, what a lot of people don’t understand, is the president just can’t change anything through an executive order. They’re not they’re not kings and queens. Those orders only allow them to make changes that are already within their authority as the executive in a certain area.”
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