Issue Position: Health Care

Issue Position

President's Obama's Affordable Care Act, passed in 2014, was the greatest progress in U.S. healthcare in decades: Tens of millions of uninsured Americans got coverage under Obamacare. Insurance companies had to accept applicants for health coverage, regardless of pre-existing conditions, and they could not charge women more for the same coverage, as had been common practice. Medicare expansion has expanded coverage for hundreds of thousands of Virginians.

Rather than embrace this progress and work to make further improvements, President Trump and Congressional Republicans continue efforts to dismantle the program. Together with the Democratic caucus, I am working to protect Obamacare and move forward toward affordable, accessible and fully universal health care. This Congress, we passed the Strengthening Health Care and Lowering Prescription Drug Costs Act. In addition to the bill's provisions to lower prescription drugs costs, it also would reinforce protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and would encourage states to create state-based health care marketplaces, which so far have higher enrollment and lower premiums than the federal marketplace. But we all know that more work remains to be done to ensure that every American has the care they need.

In addition, I join the sorrow of alarm of millions of Americans at the spike in suicides in our nation. The rate of suicide is at a 30-year high, and is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, with half of the 45,000 reported annual suicides caused by firearms. My amendment to study how to better equip the Suicide Lifeline to geolocate callers -- a sometimes-fraught effort with zip codes that do not necessarily correlate to location -- passed the House in June 2019.

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