What a Harris presidency could mean for health care

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is framing health care as a pocketbook issue as part of her policy campaign, according to two journalists who have been covering her candidacy.

The University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism held a recent webinar to examine what a Harris presidency would mean for health care.

The economy is on the top of voters’ minds this election season, and health care costs factor into those economic concerns, said Megan Messerly, political reporter with Politico.

Rachel Cohrs Zhang, chief Washington correspondent with STAT, said Harris wants to work with the states to have millions of dollars in medical debt forgiven. One model for this is where states are using federal COVID-19 relief dollars that were left unspent to pay hospitals pennies on the dollar for older debt, mostly for low-income patients.

A new model in North Carolina is a structured program to use Medicaid dollars “to pay hospitals billions of dollars to both relieve medical debt and implement some measures on the front end, some guardrails to try to keep patients from going into debt in the first place,” she said. “But the price tag could be challenging if we’re looking at this on a national scale.”

In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which expanded federal subsidies to enable more people to qualify for subsidies to purchase health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Those subsidies led to record enrollment in ACA plans, but will expire in 2025, unless Congress acts to renew them, Zhang said.

“I don’t know it will be a yes or no decision on whether subsidies are renewed,” she said. “They could be renewed on a limited basis to a smaller number of people. There’s a real question on whether these subsidies will be renewed. People will lose insurance if they can’t afford the premiums when they increase. This is a consequential issue that hasn’t been discussed on the campaign trail.”

Medicaid expansion is another health care issue that Harris could face, Messerly said. She believes that if Harris is elected, we could see her administration continue the Biden administration’s efforts in working with the states that haven’t expanded Medicaid “to help that state get something done that works for them and expands coverage for more people.”

Abortion has been a major issue in the 2024 campaign, and Harris has campaigned on preserving access to abortion. But Messerly questioned what more the candidate could do about access.

“It’s extremely unlikely that Congress will pass a bill codifying abortion access into law,” she said.

However, she said, abortion advocates have been pushing Harris to use federal law that says hospitals must provide emergency care in order to receive Medicare funds as a way to require hospitals to provide care to women who are miscarrying or who had an abortion and need medical intervention.

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Susan Rupe is editor in chief, magazine, for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].