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.