Health Care

Senator Coons believes that every American deserves access to quality, affordable health care.

No child, parent, or grandparent should have to suffer because their family can’t afford the treatments they need. He is working every day to make that a reality by protecting and strengthening the programs that give people a health care lifeline: Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. He knows how essential these programs are for kids, seniors, and working class Americans for everything from emergency surgery to combatting opioid addiction. 

If you don’t have health, it almost doesn’t matter what else you have. If you have good health, you can do almost anything.

Senator Coons is making sure no one is left behind as we research new treatments and cures. Like many Americans, Senator Coons has lost family and friends to cancer, ALS, and Alzheimer’s. He knows that sometimes hope is all you have. Cutting-edge biomedical research and clinical trials from Delaware’s pharmaceutical companies or the National Institutes for Health give families the hope they need to fight day after day. Government funding for those trials helps researchers take on more patients and invest in the basic science that will one day lead to cures. As Co-Chair of the Senate ALS Caucus and a member of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Coons is supporting legislation that will help Americans focus on living their lives – not fighting for them.

Some of Senator Coons’ accomplishments on health care include: 
  • Senator Coons is fighting for every Delawarean’s access to affordable health care, regardless of how they get their insurance. He voted to expand tax credits for working families buying insurance on the ACA marketplace in 2021. This investment doubled the number of Americans able to get health coverage through the marketplace. He’s pushing the Senate to make these investments permanent and cut the red tape preventing so many Americans from accessing care.
  • Senator Coons played a key role in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which lowered the cost of insulin to $35 a month for seniors and capped out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 a year for those on Medicare. It also gave Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices, which will mean billions of dollars in savings for older Americans.
  • Senator Coons lost his father, uncle, and pastor to pancreatic cancer, and he has long championed cancer research by expanding funding for the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Health Research and Development Program, which focuses on diseases that impact servicemembers. He also created the Pancreatic Cancer Research Program at the Department of Defense.
  • Senator Coons has seen firsthand how ALS affects families in Delaware and around the country. He wrote the ACT for ALS Act, bipartisan legislation signed into law in 2021 that expands funding for cutting-edge treatments for ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases. He is also honored to be the Co-Chair of the Senate ALS Caucus.
  • Senator Coons has worked to fill the gaps in Delaware’s health care workforce by securing investments such as $1.5 million for Nemours Children’s Health’s new training program for youth mental health counselors. He’s also championed $7 million in funding for Westside Family Healthcare to update its facilities and training programs.
  • Senator Coons knows the devastation opioids have brought to families and communities up and down the First State. He increased funding for the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s Drug Free Community Support Program and has secured hundreds of thousands of dollars from the program for organizations battling youth substance abuse in Delaware like the Bellevue Community Center.

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