Healthcare Post 3: Preventative Care

Healthcare is a huge topic, and one which is heavily politically charged. This is the third of three posts in which I have examined each candidate's positions on three parts of healthcare: mental healthcare, healthcare cost and coverage, and preventative care. This post will be about preventative care.

An illness is like a crime: it can take things from you which you value, it can prevent you from doing things you want to do, it can even kill you. It is obviously better to prevent illness than to attempt to treat it after the fact. This is doubly true when you look at the cost savings in preventing illness rather than treating it when it occurs.

When I decided to write this article, I expected it to be far more interesting than it turned out to be. All three candidates support universal vaccinations. Because of this, most of the analysis for this post will be about preventive care in ObamaCare versus nothing versus medicare.

Hillary Clinton supports ObamaCare, also known as The Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare has numerous preventive care provisions, including vaccinations for adults and children, constraception for women, and fluoride supplements for children.

Clinton famously challenged vaccines on the thimerosal issue in the 2008 election, but now that the science is even more settled, has backed down from that stance. As is typically a reasonable criticism of Clinton, she was very slow to accept the science after it was settled, but she has accepted it now.

Gary Johnson thinks that people should not see doctors if they are not sick, because the insurance model of healthcare is crazy. He likens it to grocery insurance, where they don't bother to put price tags on things, and you can just grab whatever food you want. Only catastrophic care should be covered by health insurance, and people should not seek preventative care.

Unfortunately, Americans are notoriously bad at saving, and medical costs are already the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA.

Jill Stein refers to our current healthcare system as "really sick care", and she wants healthcare to focus more on prevention. As a doctor, Stein has actually written a paper on the subject.

Unfortunately, Stein goes a bit off the rails after this. She bashes GMOs, claiming that they are unsafe despite centuries of lack of evidence. Though she supports vaccines, she attacks the FDA and CDC as being too corrupt. She says that wifi is bad for children.

This is the last post about the presidential candidates' policies and positions on healthcare. Going into this, I expected Doctor Jill Stein to have a major advantage over the other candidates, being a doctor and all, but it didn't turn out that way. Gary Johnson is unlikely to have a section in which he does as poorly going forward. Hillary Clinton appears to be the winner in the healthcare debate.

The topic for September will be crime. I intend to look at the three candidates' positions on prisons and sentencing, corruption and white-collar crime, and violent crime and guns. I will round out September with a whimsical discussion of the political views of TV characters, like Mickey Mouse, Donald Trump, and Elmo.

Healthcare Post 2: Coverage and Affordability.

Healthcare is a huge topic, and one which is heavily politically charged.  This is the second of three posts in which I intend to examine each candidate's positions on three parts of healthcare: mental healthcare, healthcare cost and coverage, and preventative care. This post will be about healthcare cost and coverage.

Healthcare in the United States is expensive, and doesn't provide good results compared to other industrialized nations.

Hillary Clinton supports defending and expanding ObamaCare, also known as The Affordable Care Act. She is also in favor of allowing people to buy into medicare as their insurance, instead of private insurance.

Clinton does not appear to have a plan to rein in spending on healthcare, only costs for the individual. This will need to be offset by increased taxes, likely increasing the overall cost to the average individual.

Gary Johnson is opposed to "government-mandated health insurance", including the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). He believes that "we need a new supreme court", after it upheld ObamaCare twice as constitutional. He would also like to repeal the drug subsidies, passed by George W. Bush.

Under Johnson's plan, people will be spending less on healthcare, due to lack of access, and classical economics claims that this will reduce the prices of healthcare.

Jill Stein supports medicare for all. If medicare's minimum age were reduced from 65 years old to one year before birth, everyone would be covered by the most efficient health insurance in the country.

Medicare has built-in price controls, but those price controls are weakened annually by a series of laws called "The Doc Fix". Despite the Doc Fix, Medicare continues to spend less for similar or better quality of care compared to other health insurers.

Next week, we will discuss preventative care.

Healthcare Post 1: Mental Health

Healthcare is a huge topic, and one which is heavily politically charged. For this and the next two posts, I intend to examine each candidate's positions on three parts of healthcare: mental healthcare, healthcare cost and coverage, and preventative care. This post will be about mental healthcare.


Mental healthcare is in a sad state in this country. Services for adults are next-to non-existent, and services for children under the age of 18 are severely limited. If you haven't read the essay, "I am Adam Lanza's Mother", only nominally about the Connecticut man who murdered a classroom of first graders with his mother's AR-15, you really should.

Let's take a look at what the candidates have to say on the subject.

Hillary Clinton has long been an advocate for mental health parity, meaning that health insurance plans would need to pay for mental health issues in much the same way as they pay for physical health issues. This led to the 1996 Mental Health Parity Act and to the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equality Act. Clinton's current work includes championing the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, which was written by Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy and Texas Democrat Eddie Johnson.

Clinton has also said that drug offenders should receive treatment for their mental illness.  

Gary Johnson wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, which has expanded mental health care to millions of Americans who would not have had access prior.  In a Reddit AMA, he told a man suffering from mental illness to start a new company, in order to earn enough to treat his mental illness.

Johnson believes that we should not lock up people suffering from drug addiction for their mental illness, and that needle exchange programs save lives,  

Jill Stein wants mental health care to be covered universally for every one from the moment of conception, by reducing the minimum age for medicare from 65 years old to to 0.

 Dr. Stein has also spoken about reducing the "culture of violence" by legalizing recreational drugs.

Now that we have looked at each candidate's position on mental health, next week, we will talk about affordability and coverage.

As an addendum, writing this blog in the style I described has been very difficult. The major networks are really only covering one candidate, between their reality shows and talk shows, and so I have to really dig to find any information on the other two candidates. I will continue to do my best to cover the candidates equally, but my source material doesn't make it easy.

The Three-Party Race

I want a blog that talks about the issues, as the candidates see them. Well, when I was a kid, whenever I asked my father why "they" didn't do something, he just asked me, "Why don't you?" So here I am, writing a blog.

In this blog, I intend to research each candidate's position on policies which are important to me, and discuss what their presidency will look like in light of these things. I will do my best to devote equal time to the policy positions of all three candidates, and I will endeavor not to devote greater than 50% more words to any candidate, no matter how much more they have to say on any one topic. With this goal in mind, I will do my best to remain positive in my descriptions of each candidate.

I will begin with a discussion of the three candidates' histories. In this post I will highlight the experience each candidate brings to the table. Spoiler alert: two candidates have political experience, and the third does not.

Let's start with the current front-runner, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Clinton has only held one elected office (Senator of New York state from 2001-2009), but has held a federally appointed office (Secretary of State 2009-2013), nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and has been in the public eye for decades as first lady, first to a governor (1983-1992), and then to a president (1993-2001).

She learned some hard lessons as the First Lady of the United States, including how to work with congress, and compromise when needed. These were demonstrated during her tenure as a senator from New York, and led to a surprising 241 bipartisan bills out of 355 bills passed in eight years. When fortified with the foreign policy experience she gained as Secretary of State, Clinton is a formidable candidate.

Next, let's look at Gary Johnson, of the Libertarian Party. Johnson is currently behind in the polls, but his goal for this time in the election cycle, given the status of the Libertarian party, is only 15%. He is very close to this goal. Johnson was governor of New Mexico from 1994-2002, and, since reaching his two-term limit there, has worked with youth to build their problem-solving and rhetorical skills.

Although Johnson was a popular governor who left the state fiscally solid (as the rest of the country suffered a minor recession), his strongest selling point is probably his choice of running mate, "Bill" Weld. William Weld was governor of Massachusetts through most the 90s, a booming time for the state. If he hadn't been figuratively shot in the foot by his own party for not being evil, he would have been the ambassador to Mexico. This means that, while neither candidate on the ticket has foreign policy experience, former president Bill Clinton (husband of the current candidate Hillary Clinton) trusted him enough on foreign policy to try to send him to one of our biggest trading partners.

The third and final candidate, Jill Stein of the Green Party, has significantly less political experience. She was elected, by the second district of the town of Lexington, MA, as a Town Meeting Representative. She has run for the governorship of Massachusetts twice, as well as other Massachusetts state offices, but has not won.

Stein is a medical doctor with a history of activism. She has written songs and organized protests on numerous progressive issues, but has lacked the focus on any one issue to effect any real change.

Her running mate, Ajamu Baraka doesn't bring anything new to the Green party ticket. He is an academic, similar to his running mate, but has less political experience. He is a leader of two organizations: the US Human Rights Network (an activist group opposed to American Exceptionalism), and the Institute for Policy Studies (a progressive think tank).

Next time, I intend to discuss healthcare issues.