Health & Medicine’s 2026 Policy Priorities

For more information, please contact:
A. Gita Krishnaswamy, Interim Executive Director, gkrishnaswamy@hmprg.org
Wesley Epplin, Policy Director, wepplin@hmprg.org

Policy Priorities

Health & Medicine’s mission, vision, and values guide our policy priorities.

Health & Medicine stands for human rights and the public’s health, and we condemn political violence in all its forms. Our policy agenda is both forward-looking in terms of our longstanding commitments to human rights and health equity—and responsive to the traumatic assaults on our communities and current threats to human rights, public health, and democracy. Our policy priorities include legislation, planning, and transforming governmental systems to advance health equity and human rights.

This is a dangerous political moment. The federal government is attacking the rights of immigrants, women, trans people, disabled people, unhoused people, people living in poverty, Black people, Brown people, and other marginalized people. Medicaid coverage and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are being sacrificed to prioritize tax cuts for billionaires. Meanwhile, fundamental constitutionally protected freedoms are under attack.

Download our 2026 Policy Priorities

Top Priorities

Aging Equity

Aging equity, in which people can live and age in place within their home and community of choice with dignity, care, and purpose

  • Implementation of Illinois’ multi-sector plan for aging
Healing-Centered and Trauma-informed State

Public and non-governmental agencies and organizations implement trauma-informed, healing-centered policies, practices, and training

  • Implementation of priorities from the Healing-Centered Illinois Task Force
  • Public funding for community-driven trauma-informed violence prevention programming
Health Workforce

The public health and health care sectors provide high-quality jobs, with hiring and retention policies that advance equity, diversity, and inclusion

  • Certification and reimbursement to sustain community health worker and other public health roles
  • Expanded health career pathways, resources, and support to grow the health workforce
Health Care as a Human Right

A guaranteed human right to health care through universal public health insurance coverage and equitable health care that is free at the point of care

  • Protection against loss of health insurance and access from attacks on Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, and other health coverage
  • Sustainable funding, accountable governance, and equitable health care at Cook County Health
  • Integrated behavioral health system in Cook County that meets people with care instead of policing
  • Welcoming and affirming health care for all people in all health care settings
Housing Justice

Healthy, safe, affordable, equitable, and accessible housing for all

  • Chicago Healthy Housing Ordinance to have rental units inspected for health hazards and remediated
  • Just cause for eviction ordinance, to limit evictions and provide relocation assistance
  • Home repair funding for low-income homeowners
Public Health

High-capacity governmental public health and progress on structural inequities

  • Sufficient, flexible, and sustained public funding for the Chicago and Cook County health departments
  • Enhanced collaboration between the Chicago and Cook County health departments
  • Expansion of guaranteed basic income programs
  • Strong public health responses to the federal policy and physical assaults on our communities
Reproductive Justice

Reproductive justice, in which all people have the right to have a child, not have a child, and to raise children in safe, healthy environments

  • Optimized laws and rules to ensure equitable, accessible, and comprehensive reproductive health
  • Increased employment of licensed certified professional midwives as primary birth attendants
  • Implementation of state strategic plan for community-based birth justice
  • Increased reimbursements and access to birth centers
  • Hold health systems and insurers accountable for reproductive health services

Additional Priorities

Health & Medicine takes an inclusive view of health and what is required for health equity. Our vision includes racial justice, economic justice, gender justice, social justice, and human rights. The items below represent additional policy issues of importance to Health & Medicine.

We provide support for these agenda items as we are able, aligning these issues with our top priorities listed above. We invite current and potential partners to reach out to Health & Medicine regarding critical moments in which we can support policy initiatives that align with health equity, such as signing a letter, giving testimony, or supporting an effort in some other way.

Learn More
Aging Equity

  • Expanded and improved long-term care workforce
  • Policy reforms to support progress on Illinois’ Olmstead consent decrees

Behavioral Health

  • Improved response to the opioids crisis, including widespread use of harm reduction initiatives, such as distribution of Naloxone, needle exchanges, and safe consumption sites

Climate and Environmental Justice

  • Environmental justice progress, including passage of a cumulative impact ordinance in Chicago
  • Tree canopy equity to provide benefits such as green space, urban cooling, and rainwater cycling
  • Strong public health response to the climate emergency and decarbonization of our economy

Community Safety

  • Defunding and abolition of police and investment in what helps make people safe
  • Creation of alternative systems for accountability and safety
  • Decarceration of prisons and jails, including moving older adults out of prison and improved transition
  • Improvement of healthcare in carceral settings
  • Stronger record sealing and expungement laws
  • Public health approaches to gun violence

Economic justice

  • Wages and benefits that help all workers and their families to thrive
  • Mandatory earned leave
  • Legal requirement for all internships to be paid
  • Progressive income tax for Illinois
  • Protect and strengthen the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) programs
  • Expansion of child tax credits
  • Universal paid parental leave
  • Free universal childcare

Education Equity

  • Equitable K-12 schools funding
  • Free college education
  • Better funded MAP grants, expansion of scholarships, loan repayment, and loan forgiveness, and other funding to make higher education more affordable, accessible, and to reduce education debt

Housing Justice

  • Care, services, and permanent supportive and affordable housing for unhoused people

Human Rights

  • Single-payer health insurance system, with care provided free at the point of service for all people
  • Defense, services, and supports for immigrant communities
  • Promote democratic engagement, including equitable and accessible voting laws
  • Ensure access to gender-affirming care

Public Health Equity

  • Accelerated lead water line replacement
  • Healthy, affordable, accessible food for all
  • Improved personal protective equipment (PPE) policies and planning
  • Improved indoor air quality standards for air filtration and ventilation
  • Improved application of complete streets policies to enable safe freedom of movement
  • Free and accessible public transportation
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