For Immediate Release: August 15, 2024
Press Contact: Jimmy Wyderko, [email protected]

VP Harris Embraces Competition Policy in Food, Housing, and Healthcare in Latest Speech

Washington, D.C. — In response to a recent speech today from Vice President Kamala Harris in Raleigh, North Carolina today along with new details on the key tenants of her campaign’s economic agenda, Fight Corporate Monopolies released the following statement.

“We’re thrilled to see that VP Harris is embracing key pillars of an anti-monopoly and pro-business agenda to better the lives of Americans across the country,” said Morgan Harper from Fight Corporate Monopolies. “From promoting competition in food and grocery to cracking down on data-drive price fixing in rental housing, this is a strong bedrock of policies to protect the economy from big corporations. With prices top of mind for working families, taking on corporate power isn’t just sound policy, it’s good politics too.”

In VP Harris’ speech today and supplementary news release, her campaign committed to promoting competition in the food and grocery industry, saying that “competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” and calling out big food corporations for jacking up prices for working families. In housing, she made firm call to address big investment firms' dominance over the rental housing market and stop the use of algorithmic price fixing software that keeps rent high—directly supporting Senator Ron Wyden’s bill to protect renters from data-driven price gouging. In healthcare, the Harris campaign committed today to cracking down on Big Medicine middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers that keep prices high and hurt independent pharmacists. She also promoted efforts from the CFPB to eliminate bogus medical debt from credit reporting.

“VP Harris already has a strong foundation to pull from with her previous position as California AG and thanks to the work of Biden-Harris antitrust enforcers,” added Harper, “The FTC is challenging the Kroger-Albertsons grocery store merger, the DOJ Antitrust Division is escalating rental housing price fixing probe into RealPage, and antitrust enforcers are investigating healthcare middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers and vertically integrated firms like UnitedHealth Group. The Biden-Harris robust approach to competition has proved to be a winning agenda, which is why we encourage VP Harris to continue building off of it and make it a centerpiece of the campaign’s economic policy.”

Read more about how the Harris campaign can talk about lowering prices here.

Learn more about Fight Corporate Monopolies here.

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Fight Corporate Monopolies is a registered 501(c)(4) nonprofit that is building a movement to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power. We do not accept any funding from corporations. For more information on Fight Corporate Monopolies, visit:fightcorporatemonopolies.org.