Vice President Kamala Harris On Social Security & Disability Benefits | Univision Town Hall

My name is Martha. I'm 62 years old and currently homeless. In 2020, I had a heart attack. Then I got diagnosed with lung COVID, which will disable me for the rest of my life. I lost my job, my income. I had no choice but to apply for Social Security Disability. It's been three years. I've been waiting for a decision. Because of no income, I lost everything. I have no health insurance. I can't get medical treatment that I need. And my question for you is, how will you help the disabled people so that they can get insurance and make America great again? I'm so sorry for everything you've been through. Your point about lung COVID. Finally, I was actually part of pushing to make sure that lung COVID is now recognized under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So it is now recognized as being a disability for the purposes of allowing you and people who have lung COVID to be eligible for disability benefits. And that's a very big point. As it relates to disability rights as a general matter, it's something I've worked on for years. The point just being very simple, frankly, which is that all people, regardless of disability, should have equal access to housing, to job opportunities, to education, and again, to dignity. And there's still a lot of work that we have to do in that regard. What we have to do in terms of also making sure that somebody who experiences an acute illness does not lose everything is still work we have to do. Part of the work that I've been doing and intend to do as president includes, for example, dealing with the issue of medical debt. So this is a big issue, which is people, through no fault of their own, experience a serious illness, and then they acquire all these bills and debt. Right now, the system is that that medical debt can be used against your credit score. Your credit score, everybody knows their credit score. It's kind of like you know your weight, you know your credit score, right? So your credit score, as we know, will determine your eligibility for everything from a small business loan to whether you qualify for a lease on an apartment. The unfairness of it, and this is what I intend to change, is that medical debt is not a measure of how responsible you are with money. It's about the fact that you experience an emergency for which you did not plan because you did not invite it. And then it works against people's ability to do things like get an apartment. So there are a number of issues that I think you're raising around how we have to see the full person and understand how one thing connects to another. Because as you have explained, a health issue that then results in an issue about literally housing and whether you are unhoused, an issue that is about what you qualify in terms of benefits, again, to be able to live with dignity and have a quality of life to which you are entitled after what I can tell are years of working hard.