The Affordable Care Act (ACA), high prescription drug costs, and reproductive health all figure prominently in the Democratic Party’s new draft platform.
The draft platform, released Friday, touched several other items of interest to health analysts, including community health centers, gun violence, and mental health.
The health insurance plank in the draft platform hewed to presumed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s goal of improving upon the ACA, rather than moving toward the goal of her challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who wants to replace the current system with a single-payer system. “Thanks to the hard work of President Obama and Democrats in Congress we took a critically important step towards the goal of universal health care by passing the ACA, which has offered coverage to 20 million more Americans and ensured millions more will never be denied coverage on account of a pre-existing condition,” the document read.
However, the draft platform did offer a slight concession to advocates for single-payer, along with a knock at Clinton’s presumed Republican opponent: “Democrats will never falter in our generations-long fight to guarantee health coverage as a fundamental right for every American. As part of that guarantee, Americans should be able to access public coverage through Medicare or a public option. By contrast, Donald Trump wants to repeal the ACA, leaving tens of millions of Americans without coverage.”
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In an email, Diana Zuckerman, PhD, president of the National Center for Health Research in Washington, called the draft platform “very solid.” “It is important that the platform emphasizes the need for NIH research as the strategy needed to develop new cures and treatments.”
She praised the draft platform’s rejection of efforts by Congress and the Obama administration to lower approval standards at the FDA, “even if it does so by not mentioning it rather than directly opposing it. Recent national polls show that Americans are more concerned about the safety and effectiveness of [currently available] medical products than they are about having ‘new’ ones.”
The draft platform’s support for lowering drug prices by importing drugs from licensed pharmacies in Canada “is an extremely important step because it would have an immediate, measurable impact,” said Zuckerman. “Several other platform strategies for lowering drug prices would also be very effective in the short-term and long-term.”
Zuckerman liked the document’s inclusion of sexual assault as a public health issue, but was concerned that sexual assault in the military wasn’t specifically included.
The Democrats will be holding a last set of platform hearings this Friday and Saturday in Orlando and then finalizing the platform for passage at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later this month.
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