Slavitt and Yang Make a Plan (with Andrew Yang)

If you actually really deeply poll people... healthcare turns out to be a bigger economic issue than their tax rate—than virtually anything else ... For just about half of Americans, a single medical expense and they are in bankruptcy. The number one phone call to the American Cancer Society hotline when people are newly diagnosed with cancer is 'I cannot afford to have cancer.'

Economists project that 42% of the jobs that we are losing [amid COVID-19] are gone forever. So, if you take as a rough ballpark estimate 40 million jobs lost, 42% would be about 17 million jobs. The Great Recession cost us 8.8 million jobs at the peak or trough depending upon what graph you're looking at. So, we're looking at two times the job loss of the Great Recession in perpetuity.

They explored heart damage in the near-term and long-term of contracting COVID-19, and what they found was, out of the patients they tested, 78% had heart damage while they were infected even if they showed no symptoms of having it and 60% continued to have [heart damage] even after they were no longer infected.

The most common job categories in the United States are clerical and administrative work—including call centers, retail & sales, food service & food preparation, truck driving, and transportation & manufacturing. Those five categories comprise about half of American jobs.

To me, cash relief [amid COVID-19] is the bare minimum we should be doing, particularly when... our government has failed us miserably in trying to stem this pandemic. And then they're failing miserably in getting enough resources into our hands so that we can actually make it through this crisis period much less do something more dramatic, like adhere to public health guidelines or stay in.

Universal basic income is non-partisan ... Liberals love it because it's going to improve education outcomes and help feed families and make us mentally stronger ... Conservatives like it because it's pro-business, it helps support the middle class, it's pro-entrepreneurship, and it doesn't have a giant bureaucracy attending to every step of it.

To me, there are... three major things that are making Americans miserable right now. Number one is healthcare; number two is housing; number three is education. And the cost for each of those things has gone up and up and up even as people's incomes have stagnated.

We need to redefine our economic measurements to revolve around how we're doing, how healthy we are, how mentally healthy we are, how our kids are doing, [and] whether our environment is going to actually be able to sustain human life. Things like that would actually tell us how we're doing instead of having these stock market prices be the end-all be-all because how these companies are doing and how we're doing have less and less [of a] relationship.

74% of Americans, including a majority of both Democrats and Republicans, support cash relief during the pandemic.

One of the other things this pandemic makes clear, hopefully to everyone, is that we cannot have healthcare tied to your employment and that we need to have some sort of public option Medicare-for-all program that folks can access without breaking the bank.