This week, nearly 43,500 New Yorkers are at risk of losing their food assistance as the Trump administration’s sweeping new SNAP work requirements hit their first deadline. About 40% of those affected are between 18 and 30 years old — young people ineligible for most exemptions who often don’t know the deadline is coming.
And it’s happening alongside something larger. The president’s plan to gut Medicaid could strip health insurance from up to 1.5 million New Yorkers and rip $13.5 billion from our hospitals and healthcare economy, while Congress hands out $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and billionaires.
Medicaid covers 6.5 million New Yorkers, including two-thirds of nursing home residents and nearly half of all children in the state. When those funds disappear, hospitals close, nursing homes shutter, and families are left to fend for themselves.
This is the result of decades of political choices — and it demands a different kind of choice in response. That’s why I am running for Congress.
I’ve spent my career in public health. The difference between countries that protect their people’s health and those that don’t isn’t money or knowledge. It’s political will.
That’s the change I’ll bring through my Day-One bill: the “Healthy People, Healthy Democracy Act.” The bill will lower drug costs by expanding Medicare negotiation authority and conditioning federal research dollars on affordable pricing. It will expand community health centers so that quality primary care is available in every neighborhood, regardless of insurance status, and make sure that safety nets hospitals are funded.
The bill will protect and expand Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA subsidies that more than 30% of this district’s residents depend on, while gradually lowering the Medicare eligibility age to achieve universal single payer system. The result will be an improved Medicare for All program that every American deserves. And, because nutrition is inseparable from health, the bill will restore SNAP benefits fully.
All of the Democrats running in the primary will vote to restore public health funding. But voting to restore funding is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to do after — and that’s where my experience fits the bill.
Throughout my career, I’ve stood up to big pharma to lower the cost of drugs. We as taxpayers invested more than $100 billion in the research behind every FDA-approved drug between 2010 and 2016. Pharmaceutical companies took the patents and charged us two to three times what people in other wealthy nations pay for the same medicines.
On behalf of the world’s poorest countries, I brought the price of the cervical cancer vaccine down 65% from the lowest available price, and 95% below what the United States was paying at the time, so it could reach girls everywhere. And I led a $7 billion federal initiative that delivered lifesaving medicines to hundreds of millions of people.
I grew up in Manhattan, gave birth to my children, and took care of my parents as they died in this district. My neighbors deserve health and democracy; that requires a representative with the experience to deliver them.
When Congress starts to rebuild what this administration destroyed, New Yorkers need someone who has actually run large government systems and can look at an agency budget and know if they’re asking for the right amount or spending it in the right places. That’s not an Albany politician or a celebrity. That representative is me.
Schwalbe is running in the Democratic primary for the 12th congressional district covering Manhattan from 14th St. to the northern end of Central Park.