Pramila Jayapal Biography, Age, Husband, Child, Medical For All, Voting Record

Pramila Jayapal Biography

Pramila Jayapal is an American politician and activist from the State of Washington. Currently, Jayapal serves as the U.S. Representative from Washington’s 7th congressional district, which includes most of Seattle as well as suburban areas of King County. Jayapal represented the 37th legislative district as a member of the Democratic Party, in the Washington State Senate from 2015 to 2017. Jayapal is the first Indian-American woman to serve in the House of Representatives. Being district’s first female member of Congress, she is also the first Asian-American to represent Washington in Congress.

Before entering electoral politics, she was a Seattle-based civil rights activist, serving until 2012 as the executive director of OneAmerica, a pro-immigrant advocacy group. Following the 2001 September 11 attacks, Jayapal founded the organization, originally called Hate Free Zone. The organization successfully sued the Bush Administration’s Immigration and Naturalization Services to prevent over 4,000 Somalis across the country from being deported.

Jayapal was described by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as “a rising star in the Democratic caucus”, currently she serves as the Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and serves on both the Judiciary and Budget committees.

Pramila Jayapal Age

Jayapal was born on September 21, 1965 in Madras, Tamil Nadu, India. She is 53 years old as of 2018.

Pramila Jayapal Husband

Jayapal is married to Steve Williamson and the two lives in the West Seattle neighborhood of Seattle.

Pramila Jayapal Child

Pramila Jayapal Early Life

Jayapal was born in Chennai, India, to a Malayali Indian family and she was raised in Indonesia and Singapore. In 1982, she immigrated to the United States at the age of 16, to attend college. Jayapal earned her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Northwestern University.

Pramila Jayapal Education

After graduating from Northwestern, Jayapal worked with PaineWebber as a financial analyst. In her time at PaineWebber, she developed a desire to apply her financial prowess to the good of society and began spending time working on development projects from Chicago to Thailand. After this occupation, she briefly worked in sales and marketing with a medical company before ultimately moving into the public sector in 1991.

Pramila Jayapal Advocacy Work

After the 2001 September 11 attacks, Jayapal founded Hate Free Zone as an advocacy group for immigrant groups. The group, Hate Free Zone registered new American citizens to vote and lobbied on immigration reform and related issues. They successfully sued the Bush Administration’s Immigration and Naturalization Services to prevent over 4,000 Somalis across the country being deported. In 2008, the group changed its name to OneAmerica. In May 2012, Jayapal stepped down from her leadership position. She was recognized by the White House as a “Champion of Change.” in 2013.

Jayapal participated in Women Disobey and the sit-in at the Hart Senate Office Building on June 29, 2018, to protest the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” approach to illegal immigration. Over 500 people, including Jayapal were arrested as a result of protest. Jayapal said she was “proud to have been arrested” for protesting the administration’s “inhumane and cruel” policy.

Pramila Jayapal Eraly Plolitical Career

She served on the Mayoral Advisory Committee that negotiated Seattle’s $15 minimum wage and co-chaired the Mayor’s police chief search committee, which resulted in the unanimous selection of the city’s first woman police chief.

Jayapal entered the race to succeed Senator Adam Kline after he announced his retirement in early 2014. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray endorsed Jayapal and won more than 51% of the vote in the August 5 primary, out of a field of six candidates. In November 2014 she went on to defeat fellow Democrat Louis Watanabe.

Jayapal was the primary sponsor of SB 5863 in the Washington State Senate, which directs the Washington State Department of Transportation to administer a pre-apprenticeship program targeting women and people of color. In July 2015 the bill passed into law. Jayapal co-sponsored a bill to test and track thousands of police department rape kits. Jayapal endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States in the Democratic primary.

Pramila Jayapal U.S. House of Representatives

Pramila Jayapal Elections

Jayapal declared her candidacy for Congress in Washington’s 7th congressional district in January 2016, after Congressman Jim McDermott announced his retirement. She received an endorsement from Bernie Sanders in April. Jayapal finished first in the top-two primary, alongside state representative Brady Walkinshaw, also a Democrat on August 2, 2016. This was the first time in the state’s history that a federal seat was contested by two Democrats. In the final weeks of the race, Jayapal and her supporters contested claims from Walkinshaw that she had not advanced enough legislation. She won the general election with 56 percent of the vote.

Pramila Jayapal Tenure

Jayapal is a co-sponsor of legislation intended to make public universities and colleges tuition-free for most families and to significantly reduce student debt. Jayapal and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) introduced the Trump Transparency Package, a series of bills aimed at promoting transparency and eliminating conflicts of interest in the Trump White House. Jayapal and her fellow co-chairs of the United for Climate and Environmental Justice Task Force also introduced a package of Environmental Justice bills to fight the impact of climate change on frontline communities. She is also a supporter of universal healthcare and co-sponsor of Expanded and Improved Medicare For All Act. Jayapal joined Justice Democrats on April 16, 2018.

Jayapal met with constituents in her congressional district instead of attending the inauguration of President Donald Trump. She was called “a leader of the resistance,” by the Nation, quoting Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi calling Jayapal “a rising star in the Democratic caucus.” Rep. Don Young (R-AK) apologized to Jayapal in September, after calling her “young lady” in an exchange that went viral. Jayapal has described facing sexism from colleagues in Congress.

Jayapal voted against a House resolution condemning the U.N. Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements built on the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Fifty seven members of the House of Representatives, including Jayapal released a condemnation of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine and Poland on April 25, 2018. They criticized Poland’s new Holocaust law, which would criminalize accusing Poles of complicity in the Holocaust and Ukraine’s 2015 memory laws glorifying Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its pro-Nazi leaders, like Roman Shukhevych.

Pramila Jayapal Leadership posts

• Senior Whip, Democratic Caucus of the United States House of Representatives
• Vice Ranking Member, United States House Committee on the Budget
• Co-chair, Congressional Progressive Caucus

Co-chair and co-founder, United for Climate and Environmental Justice Task Force

• Chair, Immigration Task Force, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC)
• Co-chair, Women’s Working Group on Immigration Reform
• DNC Transition Team Member

Committee memberships

• Committee on the Judiciary
• Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security
• Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet
• Committee on the Budget Vice Ranking Member

Jayapal is also a member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Pramila Jayapal Author

In 2000, Jayapal became a U.S. citizen. Jayapal is the author of Pilgrimage: One Woman’s Return to a Changing India, which was published in March 2000.

Pramila Jayapal Medicare for All

Source: vox.com

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is introducing the most ambitious Medicare-for-all plan yet — one that envisions a quick transition to a public health plan with a robust set of benefits. The co-chair of the Progressive Caucus is releasing a proposal Wednesday to transition the United States to a single-payer health care system, one in which a single, government-run health plan provides insurance coverage to all Americans.

“We mean a complete transformation of our health care system and we mean a system where there are no private insurance companies that provide these core benefits,” Jayapal told reporters Tuesday. “We mean universal care, everybody in, nobody out.” Jayapal’s bill envisions a future where all Americans have health coverage and pay nothing out of pocket when they visit the doctor or hospital. Her plan, the Medicare for All Act of 2019, describes a benefit package that is more generous than what other single-payer countries, like England or Canada, currently offer. The benefits in Jayapal’s bill are even more generous than those included in Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) Medicare-for-all plan. But where the Jayapal plan has great detail into what is covered, it does not get into a crucial question: how the government will pay for the new health care program.

The new proposal comes at a moment that Democrats are coalescing around a Medicare-for-all platform. Frontrunner candidates in the Democratic primary like Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have all signed on as co-sponsors to Sanders’s single-payer bill in the Senate. The health care industry has already begun to gird for a major health care fight should a Democrat win in 2020, recently launching a new coalition of hospitals, insurers, and drugmakers to oppose the Medicare-for-all agenda. Jayapal says she’s ready: She’s already secured a promise from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold the first-ever House hearings on Medicare-for-all later this year.

“We will be pushing it as hard as we can and as fast as we can,” Jayapal says. “Enough nibbling around the edges. We really need to transform the system.” Jayapal’s Medicare-for-all plan has a very generous benefit package — and a quick transition to government-run health care. Jayapal’s single-payer proposal would create a universal Medicare program that covers all American residents in one government-run health plan.

It would bar employers from offering separate plans that compete with this new, government-run option. It would sunset Medicare and Medicaid, transitioning their enrollees into the new universal plan. It would, however, allow two existing health systems to continue to operate as they do now: the Veterans Affairs health system and the Indian Health Services. Those who do qualify for the new universal Medicare plan would transition into the program over the course of two years. This would start with people under 19 and over 55 moving into the program one year after it became law — and everyone else one year after that. It’s worth noting that this is actually a faster transition than what Sen. Sanders envisions in his proposal, which would give the United States four years to stand up to a government-run plan.

Eventually, though, everyone would all end up in the same plan, which includes an especially robust set of benefits. It would cover hospital visits, primary care, medical devices, lab services, maternity care, and prescription drugs, as well as vision and dental benefits. Jayapal’s bill would cover abortion services, as does the newest version of Sanders’s plan. Jayapal’s plan also includes coverage for long-term care services for nursing services. The current Medicare program does not include this benefit, nor does Sanders’s single-payer plan in the Senate. That would make the health care system she envisions more generous than the one Sanders has proposed, but also more expensive.

The plan is also significantly more generous than the single-payer plans run by America’s peer countries. The Canadian health care system, for example, does not cover vision or dental care, prescription drugs, rehabilitative services, or home health services. Instead, two-thirds of Canadians take out private insurance policies to cover these benefits. The Netherlands has a similar set of benefits (it also excludes dental and vision care), as does Australia.

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