With the election just days away, Larry Levitt joins me to discuss where Harris and Trump stand on key health issues: reproductive health, affordability and Medicaid. While health has not taken center stage (as it has in the past), the outcome of this election will have profound impacts on every aspect of health in the years ahead.

We discuss:

• Why the ACA is no longer a political battlefield
• The shifting dynamics of abortion as a single-issue vote
• Why medical debt and drug prices are key affordability issues to watch
• Whether we could see bipartisan progress on AI governance, long term care or PBM reform over the next four years

Larry reminds us that health IS an economic issue:

“People think of the economy and health care being separate issues, but they're In fact, not separate issues at all. I mean, we spend an enormous amount on health care. A lot of people's household budgets go to health care. So, you know, when you talk about an economic issue, health is an economic issue, issue for people.”

Relevant Links

KFF panel: What the 2024 election could mean for health coverage, affordability and the budget

KFF election 2024 page

How medical debt is the canary in the coal mine for health affordability [article]

Project 2025

Abortion-related state ballot measures

About Our Guest

Larry Levitt is the executive vice president for health policy, overseeing KFF’s policy work on Medicare, Medicaid, the health care marketplace, the Affordable Care Act, racial equity, women’s health, and global health. He previously was editor-in-chief of kaisernetwork.org, which was KFF’s online health policy news and information service and directed KFF’s communications.

Prior to joining KFF, Levitt served as a senior health policy adviser to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, working on the development of the Clinton Administration’s Health Security Act and other health policy initiatives. Earlier, he was the special assistant for health policy with California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, a medical economist with Kaiser Permanente, and served in a number of positions in the Massachusetts state government.

Levitt holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Source: https://www.kff.org/person/larry-levitt/

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How do you create a healthier city? As the climate shifts, screens dominate our lives and cities continue to grow - urban areas are grappling with how to put themselves on a better track to health. New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan joins The Other 80 to talk about his ambitious plan to increase health in the Big Apple, with the goal of increasing life expectancy from 78 to 83 years.

We discuss:

• What Paul Farmer taught him about rejecting a scarcity mindset and reaching for bold goals
• The three cross-cutting challenges addressed in the Healthy NYC agenda: access to primary care, mental health and climate change
• Why NY issued a public health advisory on teen social media use and is suing Meta, Tik Tok YouTube and SnapChat

Ashwin shares why youth social media use is such a major public health priority:

“ Our kids are hurting … Fifty percent of teens are saying that they are either moderately or severely depressed …It's hard to ignore the role that digital media and social media is playing … And what we found was pretty troubling …The more time you're spending on social media, the worse your self -reported mental health is. Whether it's symptoms of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, fear for the future.”

Relevant Links

Article: “Using Law to Advance Population Health Management”

The City of New York’s Advisory on Social Media

More information on Healthy NYC

Viral Video of “Dancing Guy”

About Our Guest

Dr. Ashwin Vasan is the 44th Health Commissioner of New York City. He is a practicing primary care physician, epidemiologist and public health expert with nearly 20 years of experience working to improve physical and mental health, social welfare and public policy outcomes for marginalized populations in New York City, nationally and globally. Throughout his career, he has brought in a unique, unparalleled focus to combating the mental health crisis, releasing a comprehensive citywide mental health plan addressing the second pandemic – a crisis of mental health plaguing youth, vulnerable New Yorkers with severe mental illness, and those impacted by the overdose epidemic. Having begun his career in global health working at Partners in Health and the HIV Department of the World Health Organization, he most recently served as the President and CEO of Fountain House, a US-based mental health nonprofit. He currently serves as faculty at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Stay Informed

Sign up for The Other 80 Newsletter to receive a monthly update with reflections, news, events, jobs and funding curated for you by Claudia. Click here to sign up.

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For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and

In July, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a landmark advisory declaring firearm violence a national public health crisis. The advisory builds on decades of work from Dr. Megan Ranney and other researchers who advocate taking a public health approach to reducing firearm violence. She joined us at Aspen Ideas: Health to discuss what this means: namely moving from a focus on law and order to centering harm reduction and prevention. Now, as the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, Megan is applying the same systems thinking approach to focus on the big changes we need to drive health in the US.

We discuss:

• What it means to be a great public health communicator
• How public health approaches were used to dramatically reduce automobile deaths over the last 50 years, and how the same strategies should be used now to tackle firearm deaths
• Her take on bridging the gap between medical care and public health

Megan says this is the moment for public health reinvention:

“This is a moment where we get to reinvent how we study, teach, and most of all, practice public health, not just locally, but also globally, as we come out of the COVID pandemic, and I think there's a real moral clarity, but also a moral imperative for us, as public health professionals, to seize this moment, to take this kind of pivot point that we're at as a field, and to move it forward in a direction that we will be proud of.”

Relevant Links

Megan Ranney testimony on gun violence as a public health issue

Gun violence panel at Aspen Ideas: Health

Surgeon General advisory on firearm violence

Yale Q&A with Dean Megan Ranney

Common health coalition

Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

UC Berkeley School of Public Health course on urban gun violence prevention

More on Rahimi case

About Our Guest

Dr. Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician, researcher, and national advocate for innovative approaches to public health. In July 2023, she joined Yale University as Dean of the Yale School of Public Health, where she is also the C.-E. A. Winslow Professor of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating digital health interventions to prevent violence and related behavioral health problems, and on COVID-related risk reduction. She has held multiple national leadership roles, including as co-founder of...