21.3 million.
That’s the number of Americans now covered thanks to the Affordable Care Act—a 31% jump up from last year with 5 million new enrollees.
How did this happen? It happened because, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Administration reduced costs for people signing up for health care. We now have the lowest rate of uninsured Americans (just 8.6% of adults under 65!) in American history.
The goal is to drive that number to zero. This huge leap in that direction would not have been possible without your work to elect Democrats up and down the ballot.
The extraordinary progress on health care is possible because of the Biden-Harris Administration, the tie-breaking Senate vote from Senator Baldwin (remember, that was in the days of the 50-50 Senate—and not one Republican voted for the IRA), and the last Democratic majority in the House. If Democrats win in 2024, we can go yet further.
But if Republicans win, we know exactly what they’ll do—because they keep telling us. They’ll rip it all apart.
Trump keeps doubling down on his pledge to shred the Affordable Care Act. In the process, if his last term is any guide, he’d gut Medicaid and eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions. And costs for families would skyrocket.
It’s not just the Affordable Care Act. One of the Biden administration’s triumphs was the law directing Medicare to actually negotiate the price of prescription drugs, and to cap the price of insulin. Those negotiations are now underway, helping address the brutal choices seniors have had to make between life-saving medicine and food on their tables. The GOP—which banned such negotiations in the first place—would ban the negotiations again if they won, and prices would rise. The special interests at Big Pharma would love that. But the rest of us would pay.
In area after area of American life, Trump’s policies would move money from Americans’ pockets to the pockets of the rich and powerful, and take away hard-fought gains that are just now becoming a reality.
We talk a lot about the stakes in this election for the future of American freedom—the freedom to access safe and legal abortion, the freedom to live in a democracy. And we’ll keep talking about those stakes. And at the same time, we can’t ignore the pocketbook stakes as well. Anyone who has experienced poverty, anyone who is juggling credit card debt and one crisis away from a financial meltdown, can tell you—the security of knowing you can afford life’s necessities is a form of freedom as well. It’s what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “freedom from want.” And it will always be a core pillar of what we fight for as Democrats.
This morning, the columnist Ezra Klein published a story about Democrats in 2024. As I told him, “Democrats are the people who are in politics to make government work for people.” It’s an old idea. It’s a good idea. And it’s what we’re seeing, every day, from the Biden-Harris Administration.
Let’s do everything we can to move it forward.