We have a general idea where the 2016 presidential candidates stand on certain healthcare issues, particularly the Affordable Care Act.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wants to keep most of the ACA in place, but look for changes that will expand insurance coverage to more Americans. She also has pledged to go after supposed price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry.
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Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called Obamacare a “disaster” and promised to repeal it. In its place, he wants to give insurers the right to sell coverage across state lines and let individuals deduct insurance premiums from their taxes.
Among other parties, the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein has called for a single-payer, “Medicare for all” system, along the lines of what Sen. Bernie Sanders advocated during his failed bid for the Democratic nomination. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson reportedly would prefer a cash-based, free-market system with price transparency; insurance, in his view, should be limited to catastrophic coverage.
But where do they stand on issues that don’t grab headlines the way the loaded “Obamacare” term does? Scientific American reached out to all four presidential candidates and this week published the responses of three of them. Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, did not respond before press time.
The magazine will grade the answers and publish its scores Sept. 22, four days before the first scheduled debate. In the interim, Scientific American has asked its readers to analyze statements from each of the presidential candidates.
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In the realm of innovation, Clinton wants “sufficient” federal funding for research that reaches beyond traditional research agencies — think National Institutes of Health — into “the broader universe of agencies that are increasingly dependent on STEM for their missions.” According to the former secretary of state:
The innovation payoff comes from the commercialization of research results. The first step is what universities call “technology transfer” and the medical community calls “translation”—demonstrating the use of research results in practice and sharing the knowledge with the business community. The government has a critical role to play at this stage by opening access to and sharing government-funded research results. I will support the development of collaborative consortia that accelerate the creation of new industries while providing valuable feedback to researchers.
Trump, given his status as a businessman and the Republican standard-bearer, is pushing private-sector entrepreneurship, but said Washington should not turn its back on science and innovation:
[T]he federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia. Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.
In response to another question about science and engineering research priorities, all three respondents said that it’s important to have a long-term scientific investment plan. Stein’s priority is climate change. Trump talked about institutional research serving as “incubators to innovation and the advancement of science.” Clinton expressed a desire to push “high-risk, high-reward efforts.”
The two major candidates also sounded off on Internet security, an increasingly important issue within healthcare in this age of ransomware and hacks directed at hospitals and health insurers.
“As president I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses and we will invest in protecting our governmental networks and national infrastructure,” Clinton said.
Trump said he would consider any attack on the Internet to be “a provocative act that requires the utmost in protection and, at a minimum, a proportional response that identifies and then eliminates threats to our Internet infrastructure.”
The presidential candidates also opined on mental health, public health, vaccinations, the opioid crisis (though Johnson didn’t respond to the Scientific American query, he has been a proponent of legalizing marijuana) and the integrity of scientific research.
Of particular interest to the health IT community, Stein’s single-payer plan seems to incorporate several aspects of population health. She wants to “allow health data to be aggregated on a population-wide scale (much of it is currently held in secret as proprietary information by private companies like health insurers) so that trends and outbreaks could be monitored.”
Photo: Matt H. Wade/Wikimedia Commons
