LEAD STORY: Healthcare at Stake
🏥 "Concepts of a Plan"
😳 What’s the issue? With less than 45 days left in the presidential race, healthcare has become a key focus of national attention. As a central issue in the 2024 election, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump offer sharply contrasting records on healthcare.
✔️ Kamala Harris's healthcare policies (links provide further information)
Support building on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Make permanent tax credit enhancements that lower health care premiums by an average of about $800 a year.
Collaborate with Congress to extend Medicaid coverage in the 10 states that haven’t expanded it under the ACA.
Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing benefits for seniors.
Negotiate lower prices with drugmakers over the 10 costliest drugs under Medicare, which include popular heart medications and diabetes drugs.
Focus on expanding women’s reproductive health services, ensuring that underserved communities have access to affordable care.
Promote gun safety.
Advance medical and environmental innovation through science which supports laboratory, clinical, public health, and environmental health research programs that span five focus areas across more than a dozen departments and agencies.
✔️ Donald Trump’s healthcare policies (links provide further information)
Repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Reduce Medicaid program.
Repeal and deregulate prescription drug pricing.
Regulate abortion, contraception, and transgender transition.
Expand (gift link) gun rights; dismiss gun-free zone policies; oppose background checks.
Restrict the influence of science in the medical and environmental fields.
🖼️ The big picture: Trump's policies focus on reducing government involvement in healthcare and promoting free-market solutions. Alternatively, Vice President Harris’ package focuses entirely on people’s out-of-pocket costs and their worries about the affordability of health care. As it turns out, in a Sept. 2024 KFF poll, health care costs dominate voters priorities as one of their chief economic concerns.
UPDATE: WOMEN'S HEALTH UNDER SEIGE
💔 Know Their Names: Amber Thurman and Candi Miller
What happened: Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old nursing assistant and mother of a 6-year-old son from Atlanta, Georgia, died in August 2022 after doctors at an Atlanta area hospital delayed necessary care due to the state’s six-week abortion ban. Read More
Atlanta mom of three, 41, Candi Miller, didn’t leave the state when she accidentally got pregnant again. She suffered from debilitating lupus, diabetes and hypertension. To save her life, she ordered abortion pills online but, like Amber, tragically did not expel all the fetal tissue from her uterus. Candi died in November 2023. Read more
What's the politics: Thurman and Miller's story speaks to the larger crisis involving Black women’s maternal mortality rates in the state. There is a direct link to the impact of state’s abortion ban to Black women’s healthcare access generally.
🔙 Looking back: Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new “Heartbeat” abortion ban into law and announced that he was “overjoyed” that the ban would keep Georgian women “safe” and “healthy.”
The law he signed specifically stated abortions could no longer be practiced in the state after a fetal heartbeat was detected, unless a woman was a victim of rape or incest or at risk of dying. The criminal penalty for medical providers who don’t adhere to the strict guidelines is up to 10 years in prison and the revocation of their medical licenses.
Bonnie Fuller writes, "In Amber's case, doctors questioned when was she close enough to death to qualify for a legal abortion under Georgia’s ban? ... For 20 hours doctors at an Atlanta hospital delayed providing her with a life-saving D & C procedure. By the time the hospital physicians believed they were meeting the new law’s standard, Amber died on the operating table." Read more
In Candi's story, Fuller continues,"when the excruciating pain set in from an infection, she was too terrified by the state’s new abortion ban to see a doctor. She suffered for days taking strong painkillers until on Nov 12, her husband found her dead in her bed, next to her 3 year-old daughter."
🛋️ Sane-Washing: JD Vance told a rally that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe V Wade was a “victory” and that “the Republican party is proud to be the ‘pro life’ and ‘pro family’ party.”
❓What's next: Depending on who wins the 2024 election, Trump and Vance could try and pass a National Abortion Ban. If not, they’ll follow their Project 2025 handbook and ‘backdoor’ their ban, or have the Justice Department enforce the 1873 Comstock Act, preventing the transportation of any abortion medications or surgical equipment across state lines. Lastly, Trump appointed FDA chief could withdraw the abortions pills as well as several other forms of popular birth control from the market.
Harris and Walz have a long track record of supporting abortion, and protecting reproductive rights. Vice President Harris has stated, "If Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States I will sign it into law.”
🖼️ Big Picture: Death is now a risk for ANY pregnancy in the 22 states which have enacted the Trump bans.
📌 UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS ⤵
🗓️ SPOTLIGHT SPEAKER: JOHN DELLA VOLPE | THURS. 09.26 | 7:00PM ET
Join us Thursday, September 26 at 7:00PM ET as we welcome John Della Volpe - one of America’s premier thought leaders on Gen Z. Volpe is an author and Director of Polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. He will speak on the enormous power Gen Z can wield in the coming elections, and on the formative factors that have defined Gen Z’s place in the arena of American politics and culture.
➡️ RSVP HERE: THURS. 09.26 | 7:00PM ET
📌 EVENT RECAPS ⤵
Emily Cherniack, Founder and Executive Director of New Politics, and Aaron Márquez, Candidate for AZ State Rep joined us. Emily is on a mission to train and recruit service leaders to run for office and who put community and country over self. See her recent article here.
Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff for Zurawski v. Texas, and Tara McGowan, publisher and co-Founder of Courier Newsroom, joined us. Zurawski’s powerful testimony highlighted the devastating impact on women who are denied essential reproductive healthcare. This conversation was a vital reminder of the importance of personal and courageous storytelling to produce social change.
🤯 Election Low-High lights
🫣 North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, per a CNN report, made numerous alleged posts on a pornography website’s message board. Robinson has been a frequent presence at Trump’s North Carolina campaign stops. The Republican nominee has referred to Robinson, who is Black, as “Martin Luther King on steroids” and long praised him. Check out CNN's Report.
🗳️ North Carolina (again) Judge Denies Republicans’ Request To Block UNC Mobile Voter ID. A North Carolina judge denied a request from the Republican National Committee (RNC) and North Carolina Republican Party to prohibit University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill students and employees from using a digital form of in-person voter identification. Read more
👎 Teamsters decline to endorse either Harris or Trump. Teamsters President Sean O'Brien sought speaking time at both parties' conventions but was snubbed at the Democratic National Convention, despite the leaders of several of the other major labor unions being given slots. Read more
👏 And yet, more than 700 current and former national security leaders, as well as former military officials, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. In a letter released on Sunday, arguing that only she had the temperament and values needed to serve as commander in chief. Read the letter
🔖 BOOKMARKS 🔖
Stories Keeping Us Up At Night 😳
💒 Under a Trump Presidency the acceptance of same-sex marriage might be overturned. Roger Severino, Trump's Director of Civil Rights at HHS, recast HHS with a strict focus on traditional marriage and family. Roger Severino’s chapter in the Project 2025 policy book encourages the next Health and Human Services secretary to endorse the idea that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure.” Read more (gift article)
(Ed. note: Roger's wife is Carrie Severino who is president of the Leonard Leo-funded conservative advocacy organization Judicial Crisis Network. She is a former law clerk for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.)
🗳️ Georgia Election Board Orders Hand-Counting of Ballots. Outcome —Critics say the move could significantly delay the reporting of results in the battleground state and inject chaos into the post-election period. Read more (gift article)
🧍♂️UPDATE: Springfield, OH — Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) continued his criticism of Trump and running mate JD Vance, in a guest essay published in The New York Times , for amplifying false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” DeWine wrote. “This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.” Read opinion piece (gift article)
✋ Can One Man’s Vote in Nebraska Could Change the Presidential Election — (Ed. Update: State Sen. Mike McDonnell said that he would not vote to change the law in Nebraska before the November election.) A Republican state senator from Omaha, Mike McDonnell, has so far stood firm against a push by former President Donald J. Trump, national Republicans, and the Nebraska G.O.P. to change Nebraska from a state that divides its electoral votes by congressional district to one that awards all of them to the statewide winner. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an ally of Trump, visited Nebraska last week. Shifting 1 electoral vote out of 538 is a game-changer, as it would set up a not-unrealistic path to an Electoral College tie. Read more (gift article)
"I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!"- Donald J. Trump, Truth Social 9/15/24
sane-washing verb | sane·wash·ing | /ˈsānˌwäSHiNG/ Definition: The act of presenting an individual, group, or idea as rational, mentally sound, or sensible, often to deflect from or downplay problematic or controversial behavior, actions, or beliefs. Similar to "greenwashing," it involves a surface-level portrayal of reasonableness without addressing underlying issues.