James Talarico

My priorities in the US Senate:

• Allow every American — regardless of their age — to join Medicare: Provide an affordable not-for-profit health care option for every American, while also bringing down costs for those who don’t participate by increasing competition with private insurance.
• Lower prescription drug costs: Increase price transparency and negotiating power to ensure fair pricing, incentivize the development and approval of generic drugs, institute caps on out-of-pocket costs, and regulate pharmacy benefit managers to ensure they’re not up-charging patients.
• Protect health coverage and lower premiums: Protect and improve the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous cuts to the ACA enhanced tax credits, Medicare, and Medicaid that will kick 15 million Americans off their insurance and raise premiums for millions more.
• Reform the prior authorization system: Ensure that insurance companies do not arbitrarily deny patients the medication and treatments that their health care providers have determined necessary.
• Restore access to reproductive health care in Texas: Codify Roe v. Wade and protect access to contraception and IVF so that families can get the reproductive care they need and so that women are no longer dying needlessly due to Texas’ dangerous abortion ban.
• Save rural hospitals: Prioritize recruiting and retaining rural health care workers, improve Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates to more swiftly deliver payments to hospitals, and make sure rural hospitals have the funding they need to continue to serve as vital employers and health care providers.
• Protect Americans from crippling medical debt: Regulate medical debt collection practices, bar the inclusion of medical debt in credit scores, and increase transparency and public reporting of both medical billing practices and the allocation of financial assistance provided by hospitals.
• Ensure veterans have access to the services they’ve earned: Stand against efforts to privatize the VA, and fund the agency to ensure every veteran receives the quality care they need.
  

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