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Former vice president Joe Biden excoriated President Trump’s Covid-19 response as he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday, casting the pandemic as the defining issue in the Nov. 3 election. Biden lambasted the president for continually downplaying the pandemic, even as it continues to spread throughout the country. (Facher, 8/20)

Bernie Sanders threw Joe Biden a lifeline on health care this week. K Street is now trying to cut it away. A deep-pocketed health care coalition has launched an assault on the public option during the Democratic National Convention, previewing the intense level of industry opposition Biden's health plan will face if he's elected president. A new six-figure ad campaign from the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future — a group consisting of hospital, insurance and pharma lobbying heavyweights — decries the public option as an expensive quagmire that would undermine private health insurance. (Luthi, 8/20)

Kaiser Health News: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’: Democrats In Array (For Now) 

Democrats have shown a remarkably united front, including on health care, in their socially distant, made-for-TV convention this week. That’s likely due, at least in part, to the physical separation of party members who disagree on issues — this year they cannot chatter on live television — and to the party truly being united in its desire to defeat President Donald Trump in November. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic continues to complicate efforts around the country to get students back to school, from preschool to college. And the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate anti-discrimination protections in health care for transgender people is put on hold by a federal judge. (Rovner, 8/20)

Kaiser Health News and Politifact HealthCheck: Democratic Convention, Night 3: Making The Party Lines Clear

The third night of the Democratic National Convention was all about one thing: Sen. Kamala Harris of California becoming the first Black and Indian American woman to accept a major political party’s vice presidential nomination. But key Democratic criticisms — many rooted in health care issues and the COVID-19 pandemic — were repeated throughout the evening. (8/20)

Wisconsin U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin used her three minutes of screen time during the virtual Democratic National Convention on Thursday evening to focus on health care policy — but she only fleetingly mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, Baldwin focused on a popular element of the Affordable Care Act she helped craft and pass in 2010: a ban on insurance companies denying coverage for patients with pre-existing medical conditions. (White, 8/20)

At least one featured speaker during the final night of the Democratic National Convention drew bipartisan approval, and he isn’t even old enough to vote in the November election. In a video segment ahead of Joe Biden’s acceptance speech Thursday night, 13-year-old Brayden Harrington recalled meeting the former vice president earlier this year during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. (Forgey, 8/21)

“It’s really amazing to hear that someone became vice president” despite stuttering, Brayden said. “He told me about a book of poems by Yeats that he would read out loud to practice.” Biden has spoken frequently about how overcoming a stutter was one of the hardest things he’s done in life. Brayden and Biden met at a February CNN town hall in Concord, where Biden spoke about overcoming a severe childhood stutter. He’s talked frequently publicly through the years about the anger and frustration of being mocked by classmates and a nun in Catholic school — and how that motivated him to work to overcome it.“It has nothing to do with your intellectual makeup,” he said at the town hall. (Weissert, 8/21)