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Excerpt from The Guardian
Tim Walz pick excites hopes of taking US healthcare beyond Obamacare era
When Kamala Harris picked the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as veep for the Democratic presidential ticket, advocates for healthcare reform felt a jolt of electricity.
Here, they saw a man who proclaimed healthcare a “basic human right”, reformed medical debt collections, and who laid the groundwork for expanded government insurance and denied corporate health insurers contracts with Medicaid, a state-run health insurance program for the poor. Walz even once joined Harris at an abortion clinic in support of abortion rights.
It was a sense of possibility some had not felt since the Obama era, and hard for some to contain their excitement.
“We’re celebrating here at the cabin,” said the Democratic Minnesota state representative Liz Reyer, who helped Walz pass a medical debt collection reform bill in 2023. She was on vacation in northern Wisconsin, sipping coffee next to her sleeping dog – a quiet, midwestern kind of celebration. Reyer felt compelled to stress “how absolutely strongly I was pulling for Governor Walz to be the VP pick”.
