On August 30, 2017, Harris announced at a town hall in Oakland that she would co-sponsor fellow Senator Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill, supporting single-payer healthcare.[129][27]
In April 2018, Harris was one of ten senators to sponsor the Choose Medicare Act, an expanded public option for health insurance that also increased ObamaCare subsidies and rendered individuals with higher income levels eligible for its assistance.[130]
In August 2018, Harris introduced the Maternal Care Access and Reducing Emergencies (CARE) Act, a bill designed to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity. In the United States, the risk of death from pregnancy-related causes for black women is three to four times higher than for white women, and black women are twice as likely to suffer from life-threatening pregnancy complications. She was joined by 13 of her Democratic colleagues.[131]
In December 2018, Harris was one of 42 senators to sign a letter to Trump administration officials Alex Azar, Seema Verma, and Steve Mnuchin arguing that the administration was improperly using Section 1332 of the Affordable Care Act to authorize states to “increase health care costs for millions of consumers while weakening protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions.” The senators requested the administration withdraw the policy and “re-engage with stakeholders, states, and Congress.”[132]
In February 2019, Harris and twenty-two other Democratic senators introduced the State Public Option Act, a bill that would authorize states to form a Medicaid buy-in program for all residents and thereby grant all denizens of the state the ability to buy into a state-driven Medicaid health insurance plan if they wished. Brian Schatz, a bill cosponsor, said the legislation would “unlock each state’s Medicaid program to anyone who wants it, giving people a high-quality, low-cost public health insurance option” and that its goal was “to make sure that every single American has comprehensive health care coverage.”[133]
In June 2019, Harris was one of eight senators to co-sponsor the Territories Health Equity Act of 2019, legislation that would remove the cap on annual federal Medicaid funding and increase federal matching rate for Medicaid expenditures of territories along with more funds being provided for prescription drug coverage to low-income seniors in an attempt to equalize funding for American territories Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands with that of U.S. states.[134]
On July 29, 2019, Harris unveiled a health plan that would expand coverage while preserving a role for private insurance companies, the plan calling for transitioning to a Medicare for All system over a period of ten years that would be concurrent with infants and the uninsured automatically being placed into the system while other individuals would have the option to buy into the health care plan backed by the government.[135] The plan has been met with some criticism from both Democrats and Republicans.[136]
In November 2019, during a Morning Joe interview, Harris declined to specify the inconsistencies in the Medicare For All plan of fellow Senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren due to believing her own plan was superior and added that she was “not going to take away people’s choice about having a public or a private plan, I am going to give people a transition that allows folks like organized labor to actually renegotiate their contract.”[137]
In April 2020, Harris was one of twenty-eight Democratic senators to sign a letter to the United States Department of Health and Human Services urging the department to reopen the online marketplace of the Affordable Care Act as to assist uninsured Americans with acquiring health insurance amid the coronavirus pandemic, opining that opening the marketplace “would provide an easy pathway to coverage for those who under previous circumstances may have decided to forego health insurance or purchase a substandard, junk insurance plan, but now in a global pandemic are in vital need of comprehensive coverage to protect themselves, their families, and our broader community.”[138]
In April 2020, Harris was one of twenty senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar regarding the removal of Dr. Rick Bright as Director of the Research and Development Authority. The senators asserted that it was of “the utmost importance that there be stable leadership within HHS and that decisions are driven by science and the public health” during the coronavirus pandemic and warned that the US could not have a steady response if its leadership was "being constantly shuffled and if experts are being constrained or removed when they insist on following the science and sticking to the facts.”[139]
