June 18, 2024
Dear Friends and Family,
To start this series, I thought it appropriate to analyze the Biden – Sanders Task Force platform recommendations which significantly impacted the Biden administration’s policy agenda. The Task Force was composed of six different committees. Each committee had eight representatives. The topics and leadership of each committee are as follows:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
To start this series, I thought it appropriate to analyze the Biden – Sanders Task Force platform recommendations which significantly impacted the Biden administration’s policy agenda. The Task Force was composed of six different committees. Each committee had eight representatives. The topics and leadership of each committee are as follows:
- Climate Change – Co-chaired by Former Sec. of State John Kerry and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- Criminal Justice – Co-chaired by Chiraag Bains and Rep. Bobby Scott (also Eric Holder, Attorney General in the Obama administration)
- Economy – Co-chaired by Rep. Karen Bass and Sara Nelson
- Education – Co-chaired by Rep. Marcia Fudge and Heather Gautney (also Randi Weingarten, President of the largest teacher’s union in the country)
- Health Care – Co-chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General
- Immigration – Co-chaired by Lucille Roybal-Allard and Marielena Hincapie
Happy Learning,
Harley
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY – SEGMENT 1
BIDEN-SANDERS UNITY TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATIONS – EXCERPTS
Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environment Justice: Climate change is a global emergency. We have no time to waste in taking action to protect Americans’ lives and futures. We will take immediate action to reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous and destructive rollbacks of critical climate and environmental protections. We will rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and on Day One, seek higher ambition from nations around the world, putting the United States back in the position of global leadership where we belong.
All jobs in the clean energy economy should provide an opportunity to join a union. The clean energy economy must represent the diversity of America. We will invest in the education and training of underrepresented groups, including people of color, low-income Americans, women, veterans, people with disabilities, and unemployed energy workers for jobs in the clean energy-related industries. We will dramatically expand solar and wind energy, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines. We will build a modern electric grid by investing in interstate transmission projects and 21st century grid technologies to power communities with clean electricity, including federal support to build sustainable and resilient energy grids in rural America and in tribal areas lacking energy infrastructure. Democrats will additionally support private adoption of affordable low-pollution and zero-emission vehicles by partnering with state and local governments to install at least 500,000 public charging stations coast to coast. We will increase investments in public transportation.
Democrats will work with affected frontline communities to develop a screening and mapping tool to ensure racial and socioeconomic equity in federal climate, energy, and infrastructure programs. We will advance innovative technologies that create cost-effective pathways for industries to decarbonize, including carbon capture and sequestration that permanently stores greenhouse gases and advanced nuclear that eliminated risks associated with conventional nuclear technology. We will restore U.S. climate leadership by working with world leaders to catalyze increased global investments in clean energy solutions and climate resilience, including to help low-income countries move along a more sustainable development path.
We will establish a new Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) within the U.S. Department of Justice to hold corporate polluters accountable.
Protecting Communities by Reforming our Criminal Justice System: Our criminal justice system has criminalized poverty, overpoliced and underserved Black and brown communities, and cut public services. Instead of offering the incarcerated the opportunity to turn their lives around, our prisons are overcrowded and continue to rely on inhumane methods of punishment. Black Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population, but 33% of the prison population. Latinos make up 16% of the U.S. population, but 23% of the prison population. Yet, our country has chosen time and again to treat people of color more harshly than white Americans. Democrats believe we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom. Police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation. Democrats also recognize that all too often, systematic cuts to public services have left police officers on the front lines of responding to social challenges for which they have not been trained, from homelessness to mental crises to the opioid epidemic.
We must start by preventing people from entering the criminal justice system in the first place. Democrats believe we must ensure reimagine policing for the benefit of safety of the American people. We support new state prosecutors through funding and technical support in their efforts to ensure public safety while reducing incarceration. We will withhold funding from states that continue to use cash bail or other pretrial practices that produce racial bias or other forms of discrimination. We will empower judges to determine appropriate sentences by fighting to repeal mandatory minimums at the federal level and give states incentives to repeal their mandatory minimums. We will appoint federal judges who have demonstrated a commitment to criminal justice reform, and who have diverse backgrounds and experiences, including as public defenders, legal aid attorneys, and civil rights lawyers.
In the rehabilitation and reentry area, we will ensure 100% of formerly incarcerated individuals have housing upon reentry. Begin by expanding funding for transitional housing and directing HUD to only contract with entities upon to housing reentrants.
Building a Stronger, Fairer Economy: The economy is not working for the American people. Democrats commit to forging a new social and economic contract with the American people. One that affirms housing is a right and not a privilege, and which makes a commitment that no one will be homeless or go hungry in the richest country on earth. A new social and economic compact that at last grapples honestly with America’s long and ongoing history of racism and disenfranchisement, of segregation and discrimination, of economic exclusion and political suppression, and invests instead in building equity and mobility for the communities of color and Native American communities who have been out and behind for generations.
We urgently need to support state and local governments, which are suffering budget shortfalls. Democrats will extend significant aid to state and local governments to address these budget shortfalls, and condition state and federal aid on maintaining and expanding public-sector employment, including provisions to protect workers’ rights. Democrats will recognize unions with majority sign-up, via so-called “card check” processes. Democrats reject any efforts to privatize public-sector jobs, from our schools to the U.S. Postal Service.
Democrats will take decisive action to level the playing field for people of color, working families, women, and others who have been left on the sidelines. Democrats will also expand access to credit by creating a public credit reporting agency to provide a non-discriminatory credit reporting alternative to the private agencies and will require its use by all federal lending programs, including home lending and student loans.
Racial Equity: Democrats commit to forging a new economic and social contract with the American people – a contract that works for the people, not just for big corporations and the wealthiest few. We need a comprehensive agenda for communities of color with ambition that matches the scale of the challenge and with recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities. We need proactive anti-discrimination detection and enforcement. On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care among others. We recognize the damaging impacts of barriers to generational wealth-building, including the legacy impact of longstanding prejudices in the employment and housing markets, and prioritize closing the racial wealth gap by lowering disparities in employment rates and compensation, health care outcomes, homeownership, and business ownership.
We will enact H.R. 40 as the building block to begin to redress the harms committed against African Americans, including slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining, and the deliberate exclusion of Black Americans from the benefits of the New Deal, G.I. Bill, and other wealth-building government programs. The Federal Reserve should significantly elevate racial equity as part of its mandate by targeting not just the overall unemployment rate, but disparate unemployment rate based on race. To do so, language in the Federal Reserve Act should be amended to require the Fed chair, in his or her semiannual report, to report not just on macroeconomic conditions, but on the extent of racial employment and wage gaps, and what the central bank is doing to reduce them.
Supporting Families: Workers need and deserve supportive workplace policies, benefits, and tax incentives that give them the best chance of succeeding at work and at home. To do so we support the following: High quality paid leave (a minimum of 12 weeks), Child Care, expanded nutritional programs, and change the tax code to further help working families.
Jobs: We believe that the USDA should take a more proactive and equitable approach to addressing racism with regards to farmers and farmworkers, so as to ensure Black, Native American, Latino, and Asian Americans are able to get the resources they need to better run their farms through USDA’s Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach Program (FOTO).
Retirement: Social Security should be expanded to make it more progressive and generous, with meaningful increases in the minimum benefit, a benefit plus-up to all beneficiaries and lifelong workers by adopting CPI-E for Social Security indexing, and higher payments for surviving spouses. There should be no social security benefit cuts of any kind including raising retirement age, means-testing of benefits, adverse adjustments to benefit calculator, or through COLA.
Providing a World-Class Education in Every Zip Code: Democrats believe we can and must do better for our children, our educators, and our country. Democrats fundamentally believe our education system should prepare all our students – all of us – for college, careers, and to be informed, engaged citizens of our communities, our country, and our planet.
Charter schools were originally intended to be publicly funded schools with increased flexibility in program design and operations. Democrats believe that education is a public good and should not be saddled with a private profit motive, which is why we will ban for-profit private charter businesses from receiving federal funding. We will call for conditioning federal funding for new, expanded charter schools or for charter school renewals on a district’s review of whether the charter will systematically underserve the neediest students. And Democrats oppose private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system.
Democrats believe that everyone should be able to earn a degree beyond high school, if they choose to, without money standing in the way. That is why we will fight to make public colleges and universities tuition-free for students whose families earn less than $125,000 – roughly 80% of the American people. Democrats also support increased funding for wraparound services, including covering the cost of textbooks and fees for low-income students and establishing programs to address campus food insecurity, so students can focus on what matters most: their studies. Democrats will work to authorize up to $10,000 in student debt relief per borrower to help families weather this crisis. Democrats support modernizing and improving the public service loan forgiveness program, including making the enrollment process automatic for people who work in schools, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. We will also make the program more generous by forgiving up to $10,000 in student debt per year for up to five years.
We will eliminate high stakes standardized tests that unfairly label students. Information from high quality assessment systems should be used to identify where students and school need extra support and resources, rather than using high-stakes tests to fire teachers; close schools; and implement scripted curricula, rote learning, and a loss of electives.
Achieving Universal, Affordable, Quality Health Care: Democrats have been fighting to achieve universal health care for a century. We are going to at last build the health care system the American people have always deserved: One that finally provides universal health care coverage; reduces prescription drug prices, premiums, and out-of-pocket costs; reins in overall health care expenses; and tackles the deep-seated inequities in our health care system that is driven by the needs of patients and the people who care for them, instead of the profit motives of big corporations.
Make no mistake: President Trump’s abject failure to respond forcefully and capably to the COVID-19 pandemic – his failure to lead – makes him responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
Democrats believe we must reverse decades of underinvestment in America’s public health infrastructure. Democrats believe we need to protect, strengthen, and build upon our bedrock care programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Affairs system. Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. Health care costs have been increasing for decades, with average premiums for an employer-provided family plan topping $20,000 last year. And yet Americans suffer from chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis at higher rates than do people in countries like France, Austria, and Switzerland. Our obesity rate is higher and our life expectancy lower than in other advanced economies. And so many Americans are dying young or in middle age – from suicide, alcoholism, and opioid abuse – that average expectancy has actually declined in recent years. Democrats know we can reduce out-of-pocket costs for families while improving the quality of health care for all.
The opioid epidemic has devastated American communities, and the Trump administration has completely failed in its response, leaving millions of families desperate for help. Democrats will make medication—assisted treatment available to all who need it and will require publicly supported health clinics to offer medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction.
Democrats oppose and will fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to women’s reproductive rights, including repealing the Hyde Amendment, and will work to protect and codify Roe vs. Wade. We will also take action to guarantee that LGBTQ+ people have full access to needed health care and resources, including by requiring that federal health plans provide coverage for HIV/AIDS treatment and HIV prevention medications like PrEP and PEP, gender confirmation surgery, and hormone therapy.
The recommendations of the Task Force will confront the cost-challenge confronting Americans head-on. Our recommendations include enabling older Americans to enroll in Medicare when they turn 60. We therefore support policies to ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people in other advanced economies, including standing up to the pharmaceutical industry’s profiteering, empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug costs with manufacturers on behalf of public and private purchasers, and applying those federal savings to lower health insurance premiums and cost-sharing as well as reinvesting in research and development. We also recommend establishing a high-quality, federally administered public option to provide long overdue competition and choice and allowing Americans dissatisfied with their employer-provided plan to choose this option. Finally, the Task Force recommends aggressively using antitrust laws to fight against mega-mergers in the hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries that raise prices for patients by undermining market competition. These and other cost cutting and value improving initiatives will allow the United States to invest in other areas, including long-term services and supports to elder and Americans with disabilities.
The Task Force believes that a unified Democratic Party must embrace and endorse the commitment of achieving equity and eliminating disparities for people of color.
The Task Force recognizes that all Americans suffer as a result of immigrants’ exclusion from the health care system. The Task Force acknowledges we will never fully address this issue until we pass and enact a 21st century immigration system, and this is and must be a priority. In the interim, the Task Force recommends that emergency services are provided and access to adequately funded community health centers is assured.
Creating a 21st Century Immigration System: Instead of pursuing a sensible, humane, and responsible approach to immigration that strengthens the United States, the Trump Administration has been callous, cruel, and reckless in the extreme. President Trump’s immigration police have made our communities less safe, undermined our economy and tarnished our image around the world.
We will start by righting the wrongs of the Trump Administration. Democrats will rescind President Trump’s fabricated “National Emergency,” which siphons funding away from our men and women in uniform to construct an unnecessary, wasteful, and ineffective wall on the southern border. Democrats will end the Trump Administration’s shameful efforts to close the door to the world’s most vulnerable refugees. It’s not only the right thing to do – it is the smart thing to do.
We will reverse Trump Administration policies that prevent victims of gang and domestic violence, as well as LGBTQ+ people who are unsafe in their home countries, from being eligible to apply for asylum. And we will end prosecution of asylum seekers at the border and policies that force them to apply from “safe third countries,” which are far from safe.
Democrats believe it is long past time to provide a roadmap to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers who are an essential part of our economy and of the fabric of our nation. We will fast-track this process for those workers who have been essential to the pandemic response and recovery efforts, including health care workers, farmworkers and others. We will also eliminate unfair barriers to naturalization, reduce application backlogs, and make our immigration processes faster, more efficient, and less costly. These reforms will strengthen our communities, our families, and our country.
We will re-establish procedures at the border, reversing nearly a dozen Trump policies that have effectively closed the U.S. asylum system, including: End the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) also known as “Remain in Mexico” and other policies that effectively deny protection and due process to asylum seekers; end the Asylum Cooperative Agreements the U.S. has signed with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and establish an effective and fair process that does not create a barrier for asylum seekers.
We will create a roadmap to citizenship for the nearly 11 million people who have been living in our country and will fast-track legal status for undocumented workers.
We will increase the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000 in the first year and seek to raise it over time, expand global efforts to register and process refugees for resettlement, and increase U.S. Government resources to support asylum seekers and the organizations providing for their needs.
Source: Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations to the Democrat Party (2020).
COMMENTARY
My summary of the recommendation report:
We are the party to right the wrongs of the world – to provide the leadership for Climate Change to achieve a zero-emissions planet and to provide asylum for the persecuted of the world.
We are the party to right the wrongs perpetrated both from America’s history and today’s society on Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, LBGTQ+, and people with disabilities. This includes:
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
BIDEN-SANDERS UNITY TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATIONS – EXCERPTS
Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environment Justice: Climate change is a global emergency. We have no time to waste in taking action to protect Americans’ lives and futures. We will take immediate action to reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous and destructive rollbacks of critical climate and environmental protections. We will rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and on Day One, seek higher ambition from nations around the world, putting the United States back in the position of global leadership where we belong.
All jobs in the clean energy economy should provide an opportunity to join a union. The clean energy economy must represent the diversity of America. We will invest in the education and training of underrepresented groups, including people of color, low-income Americans, women, veterans, people with disabilities, and unemployed energy workers for jobs in the clean energy-related industries. We will dramatically expand solar and wind energy, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines. We will build a modern electric grid by investing in interstate transmission projects and 21st century grid technologies to power communities with clean electricity, including federal support to build sustainable and resilient energy grids in rural America and in tribal areas lacking energy infrastructure. Democrats will additionally support private adoption of affordable low-pollution and zero-emission vehicles by partnering with state and local governments to install at least 500,000 public charging stations coast to coast. We will increase investments in public transportation.
Democrats will work with affected frontline communities to develop a screening and mapping tool to ensure racial and socioeconomic equity in federal climate, energy, and infrastructure programs. We will advance innovative technologies that create cost-effective pathways for industries to decarbonize, including carbon capture and sequestration that permanently stores greenhouse gases and advanced nuclear that eliminated risks associated with conventional nuclear technology. We will restore U.S. climate leadership by working with world leaders to catalyze increased global investments in clean energy solutions and climate resilience, including to help low-income countries move along a more sustainable development path.
We will establish a new Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) within the U.S. Department of Justice to hold corporate polluters accountable.
Protecting Communities by Reforming our Criminal Justice System: Our criminal justice system has criminalized poverty, overpoliced and underserved Black and brown communities, and cut public services. Instead of offering the incarcerated the opportunity to turn their lives around, our prisons are overcrowded and continue to rely on inhumane methods of punishment. Black Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population, but 33% of the prison population. Latinos make up 16% of the U.S. population, but 23% of the prison population. Yet, our country has chosen time and again to treat people of color more harshly than white Americans. Democrats believe we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom. Police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation. Democrats also recognize that all too often, systematic cuts to public services have left police officers on the front lines of responding to social challenges for which they have not been trained, from homelessness to mental crises to the opioid epidemic.
We must start by preventing people from entering the criminal justice system in the first place. Democrats believe we must ensure reimagine policing for the benefit of safety of the American people. We support new state prosecutors through funding and technical support in their efforts to ensure public safety while reducing incarceration. We will withhold funding from states that continue to use cash bail or other pretrial practices that produce racial bias or other forms of discrimination. We will empower judges to determine appropriate sentences by fighting to repeal mandatory minimums at the federal level and give states incentives to repeal their mandatory minimums. We will appoint federal judges who have demonstrated a commitment to criminal justice reform, and who have diverse backgrounds and experiences, including as public defenders, legal aid attorneys, and civil rights lawyers.
In the rehabilitation and reentry area, we will ensure 100% of formerly incarcerated individuals have housing upon reentry. Begin by expanding funding for transitional housing and directing HUD to only contract with entities upon to housing reentrants.
Building a Stronger, Fairer Economy: The economy is not working for the American people. Democrats commit to forging a new social and economic contract with the American people. One that affirms housing is a right and not a privilege, and which makes a commitment that no one will be homeless or go hungry in the richest country on earth. A new social and economic compact that at last grapples honestly with America’s long and ongoing history of racism and disenfranchisement, of segregation and discrimination, of economic exclusion and political suppression, and invests instead in building equity and mobility for the communities of color and Native American communities who have been out and behind for generations.
We urgently need to support state and local governments, which are suffering budget shortfalls. Democrats will extend significant aid to state and local governments to address these budget shortfalls, and condition state and federal aid on maintaining and expanding public-sector employment, including provisions to protect workers’ rights. Democrats will recognize unions with majority sign-up, via so-called “card check” processes. Democrats reject any efforts to privatize public-sector jobs, from our schools to the U.S. Postal Service.
Democrats will take decisive action to level the playing field for people of color, working families, women, and others who have been left on the sidelines. Democrats will also expand access to credit by creating a public credit reporting agency to provide a non-discriminatory credit reporting alternative to the private agencies and will require its use by all federal lending programs, including home lending and student loans.
Racial Equity: Democrats commit to forging a new economic and social contract with the American people – a contract that works for the people, not just for big corporations and the wealthiest few. We need a comprehensive agenda for communities of color with ambition that matches the scale of the challenge and with recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities. We need proactive anti-discrimination detection and enforcement. On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care among others. We recognize the damaging impacts of barriers to generational wealth-building, including the legacy impact of longstanding prejudices in the employment and housing markets, and prioritize closing the racial wealth gap by lowering disparities in employment rates and compensation, health care outcomes, homeownership, and business ownership.
We will enact H.R. 40 as the building block to begin to redress the harms committed against African Americans, including slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining, and the deliberate exclusion of Black Americans from the benefits of the New Deal, G.I. Bill, and other wealth-building government programs. The Federal Reserve should significantly elevate racial equity as part of its mandate by targeting not just the overall unemployment rate, but disparate unemployment rate based on race. To do so, language in the Federal Reserve Act should be amended to require the Fed chair, in his or her semiannual report, to report not just on macroeconomic conditions, but on the extent of racial employment and wage gaps, and what the central bank is doing to reduce them.
Supporting Families: Workers need and deserve supportive workplace policies, benefits, and tax incentives that give them the best chance of succeeding at work and at home. To do so we support the following: High quality paid leave (a minimum of 12 weeks), Child Care, expanded nutritional programs, and change the tax code to further help working families.
Jobs: We believe that the USDA should take a more proactive and equitable approach to addressing racism with regards to farmers and farmworkers, so as to ensure Black, Native American, Latino, and Asian Americans are able to get the resources they need to better run their farms through USDA’s Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach Program (FOTO).
Retirement: Social Security should be expanded to make it more progressive and generous, with meaningful increases in the minimum benefit, a benefit plus-up to all beneficiaries and lifelong workers by adopting CPI-E for Social Security indexing, and higher payments for surviving spouses. There should be no social security benefit cuts of any kind including raising retirement age, means-testing of benefits, adverse adjustments to benefit calculator, or through COLA.
Providing a World-Class Education in Every Zip Code: Democrats believe we can and must do better for our children, our educators, and our country. Democrats fundamentally believe our education system should prepare all our students – all of us – for college, careers, and to be informed, engaged citizens of our communities, our country, and our planet.
Charter schools were originally intended to be publicly funded schools with increased flexibility in program design and operations. Democrats believe that education is a public good and should not be saddled with a private profit motive, which is why we will ban for-profit private charter businesses from receiving federal funding. We will call for conditioning federal funding for new, expanded charter schools or for charter school renewals on a district’s review of whether the charter will systematically underserve the neediest students. And Democrats oppose private school vouchers and other policies that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from the public school system.
Democrats believe that everyone should be able to earn a degree beyond high school, if they choose to, without money standing in the way. That is why we will fight to make public colleges and universities tuition-free for students whose families earn less than $125,000 – roughly 80% of the American people. Democrats also support increased funding for wraparound services, including covering the cost of textbooks and fees for low-income students and establishing programs to address campus food insecurity, so students can focus on what matters most: their studies. Democrats will work to authorize up to $10,000 in student debt relief per borrower to help families weather this crisis. Democrats support modernizing and improving the public service loan forgiveness program, including making the enrollment process automatic for people who work in schools, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. We will also make the program more generous by forgiving up to $10,000 in student debt per year for up to five years.
We will eliminate high stakes standardized tests that unfairly label students. Information from high quality assessment systems should be used to identify where students and school need extra support and resources, rather than using high-stakes tests to fire teachers; close schools; and implement scripted curricula, rote learning, and a loss of electives.
Achieving Universal, Affordable, Quality Health Care: Democrats have been fighting to achieve universal health care for a century. We are going to at last build the health care system the American people have always deserved: One that finally provides universal health care coverage; reduces prescription drug prices, premiums, and out-of-pocket costs; reins in overall health care expenses; and tackles the deep-seated inequities in our health care system that is driven by the needs of patients and the people who care for them, instead of the profit motives of big corporations.
Make no mistake: President Trump’s abject failure to respond forcefully and capably to the COVID-19 pandemic – his failure to lead – makes him responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
Democrats believe we must reverse decades of underinvestment in America’s public health infrastructure. Democrats believe we need to protect, strengthen, and build upon our bedrock care programs, including the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Affairs system. Private insurers need real competition to ensure they have incentive to provide affordable, quality coverage to every American. Health care costs have been increasing for decades, with average premiums for an employer-provided family plan topping $20,000 last year. And yet Americans suffer from chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis at higher rates than do people in countries like France, Austria, and Switzerland. Our obesity rate is higher and our life expectancy lower than in other advanced economies. And so many Americans are dying young or in middle age – from suicide, alcoholism, and opioid abuse – that average expectancy has actually declined in recent years. Democrats know we can reduce out-of-pocket costs for families while improving the quality of health care for all.
The opioid epidemic has devastated American communities, and the Trump administration has completely failed in its response, leaving millions of families desperate for help. Democrats will make medication—assisted treatment available to all who need it and will require publicly supported health clinics to offer medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction.
Democrats oppose and will fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to women’s reproductive rights, including repealing the Hyde Amendment, and will work to protect and codify Roe vs. Wade. We will also take action to guarantee that LGBTQ+ people have full access to needed health care and resources, including by requiring that federal health plans provide coverage for HIV/AIDS treatment and HIV prevention medications like PrEP and PEP, gender confirmation surgery, and hormone therapy.
The recommendations of the Task Force will confront the cost-challenge confronting Americans head-on. Our recommendations include enabling older Americans to enroll in Medicare when they turn 60. We therefore support policies to ensure that Americans do not pay more for prescription drugs than people in other advanced economies, including standing up to the pharmaceutical industry’s profiteering, empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug costs with manufacturers on behalf of public and private purchasers, and applying those federal savings to lower health insurance premiums and cost-sharing as well as reinvesting in research and development. We also recommend establishing a high-quality, federally administered public option to provide long overdue competition and choice and allowing Americans dissatisfied with their employer-provided plan to choose this option. Finally, the Task Force recommends aggressively using antitrust laws to fight against mega-mergers in the hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries that raise prices for patients by undermining market competition. These and other cost cutting and value improving initiatives will allow the United States to invest in other areas, including long-term services and supports to elder and Americans with disabilities.
The Task Force believes that a unified Democratic Party must embrace and endorse the commitment of achieving equity and eliminating disparities for people of color.
The Task Force recognizes that all Americans suffer as a result of immigrants’ exclusion from the health care system. The Task Force acknowledges we will never fully address this issue until we pass and enact a 21st century immigration system, and this is and must be a priority. In the interim, the Task Force recommends that emergency services are provided and access to adequately funded community health centers is assured.
Creating a 21st Century Immigration System: Instead of pursuing a sensible, humane, and responsible approach to immigration that strengthens the United States, the Trump Administration has been callous, cruel, and reckless in the extreme. President Trump’s immigration police have made our communities less safe, undermined our economy and tarnished our image around the world.
We will start by righting the wrongs of the Trump Administration. Democrats will rescind President Trump’s fabricated “National Emergency,” which siphons funding away from our men and women in uniform to construct an unnecessary, wasteful, and ineffective wall on the southern border. Democrats will end the Trump Administration’s shameful efforts to close the door to the world’s most vulnerable refugees. It’s not only the right thing to do – it is the smart thing to do.
We will reverse Trump Administration policies that prevent victims of gang and domestic violence, as well as LGBTQ+ people who are unsafe in their home countries, from being eligible to apply for asylum. And we will end prosecution of asylum seekers at the border and policies that force them to apply from “safe third countries,” which are far from safe.
Democrats believe it is long past time to provide a roadmap to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers who are an essential part of our economy and of the fabric of our nation. We will fast-track this process for those workers who have been essential to the pandemic response and recovery efforts, including health care workers, farmworkers and others. We will also eliminate unfair barriers to naturalization, reduce application backlogs, and make our immigration processes faster, more efficient, and less costly. These reforms will strengthen our communities, our families, and our country.
We will re-establish procedures at the border, reversing nearly a dozen Trump policies that have effectively closed the U.S. asylum system, including: End the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) also known as “Remain in Mexico” and other policies that effectively deny protection and due process to asylum seekers; end the Asylum Cooperative Agreements the U.S. has signed with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and establish an effective and fair process that does not create a barrier for asylum seekers.
We will create a roadmap to citizenship for the nearly 11 million people who have been living in our country and will fast-track legal status for undocumented workers.
We will increase the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000 in the first year and seek to raise it over time, expand global efforts to register and process refugees for resettlement, and increase U.S. Government resources to support asylum seekers and the organizations providing for their needs.
Source: Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations to the Democrat Party (2020).
COMMENTARY
My summary of the recommendation report:
We are the party to right the wrongs of the world – to provide the leadership for Climate Change to achieve a zero-emissions planet and to provide asylum for the persecuted of the world.
We are the party to right the wrongs perpetrated both from America’s history and today’s society on Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, LBGTQ+, and people with disabilities. This includes:
- The victims of discrimination.
- The oppression of the poor.
- The victims of microaggression.
- Dramatic reductions in income inequality.
- The un-justice perpetrated on criminals.
- The objective for each is to achieve equity (the same outcome) or better versus Whites.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| country_1l_unity_task_force_-_segment_1.pdf |