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YOU WOULDN’T GUESS it from the constant roar of bad news, but things are looking up. Yes, more needs to be done—and Kamala Harris is charting a path to lower costs and help more and more folks move into an enduring middle class—but wages are up, inflation has cooled, and the Biden-Harris administration has created more jobs than any other in history. America’s economy is the strongest in the world. Biden and Harris have invested in our country’s future—in our roads, bridges, electrical grid, manufacturing sector, hospitals, and schools. They cut child poverty in half.
And the labor movement is in a renaissance. Labor activism is sweeping the nation, and our union has never been stronger. The AFT now has 1.8 million members and is the nation’s fastest-growing healthcare union.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are fighting for us. Their North Star is making life better for working people.
Harris and Walz have pledged to invest in great public schools and make college affordable for all. They want to expand the right to organize and have proposed policies that increase wages, make housing and healthcare more affordable, and fight price gouging to lower grocery, gas, and prescription drug prices. They will strengthen Social Security and empower working people to organize. They’ve vowed to protect our fundamental freedoms, from voting to making reproductive decisions. They champion an opportunity economy that ensures everyone can not only get by but get ahead.
In contrast, Donald Trump is more dystopian and angrier than ever. His policies are embodied in Project 2025—an authoritarian, anti-American, deeply unpopular agenda written by Trump acolytes. (The goal, according to its chief architect, is “institutionalizing Trumpism.”)
Take healthcare. Project 2025 eliminates protections for people with preexisting conditions. It allows the government to monitor pregnancies, prosecute people if they miscarry, and imprison doctors and nurses who treat patients experiencing pregnancy-related health crises. It bans Medicare from negotiating drug prices and cuts Medicaid.
What would Harris and Walz do? Build on the progress made by the Biden-Harris administration. As you’ll read in this issue (see here), Medicare can now negotiate lower prescription drug prices, and the cost of insulin is capped at $35 per month. Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been strengthened, increasing the number of insured people to the highest in history. This administration has secured billions to: Train more nurses. Invest in community health workers. Prevent and treat cancer. Improve geriatric care, including home care. Keep rural hospitals open. Expand mental health care. Biden and Harris also have taken on the corporate “medical-industrial complex,” from protecting patients from surprise medical bills to proposing federal standards for hospital maternal care.
High-quality healthcare is a right. And Harris and Walz are taking steps in that direction: Expand the ACA and extend Medicare’s $35 cap on insulin and $2,000 cap on medications to all Americans. Make permanent the Biden-Harris tax credits that are lowering healthcare premiums for millions of Americans. Work with states to cancel crushing medical debt. Combat maternal mortality.
That is their plan. What is Trump’s? He told us in the September debate that he has “concepts.” Instead of concepts, let’s look at the reality on the ground and what a Trump victory would mean.
The three articles that open this issue, featuring nurses in Connecticut, Oregon, and Montana, show that short staffing is causing a surge in workplace violence and driving workers out of healthcare. Through our Code Red campaigns, we’re fighting back with legislation and collective bargaining. But as the next three articles on financialization in healthcare show, to win the care that our patients deserve, we must defeat corporate greed. That will be much harder under Donald Trump. Project 2025 demonstrates that he stands with the ultra-rich.
As private equity is buying up hospitals, cutting staff, and selling off assets, the Steward bankruptcy (see here) is Exhibit A for how greed decimates healthcare. The AFT represents nurses at Steward’s Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Warren, Ohio, which faces an uncertain future. Despite this, our nurses show up for work every day and care for their patients. That’s why I showed up to the Senate hearing on Steward in September, even though Steward’s then-CEO Ralph de la Torre didn’t. Project 2025 will reward people like de la Torre with tax cuts, while making it harder to vote for leaders who actually care about workers.
We are at a historic juncture. In November, let’s get out the vote for a country where healthcare is a right, hospitals put patients over profits, and healthcare workers are treated like the heroes you are.
[Photo: AFT]