This Election —And a Coming Supreme Court Decision—Will Decide the Future of American Health Care

It’s safe to say that COVID-19, the country’s worst public health crisis in a generation, was the single most important issue in the 2020 Presidential race. It warped the campaign, sickened a candidate, and shaped not only voters’ opinions, but how they cast their ballots. But amidst this unprecedented crisis, the topic of American health care—the single most important issue in the 2018 midterm race—got relatively little attention once the primary was over. The candidates rarely gave speeches about insurance premiums or co-pays, and most Americans remain unclear about what, exactly, BidenCare is, or whether Donald Trump’s long-promised “brand new, beautiful health care” even exists. In the closing days of the election, former Vice President Joe Biden tried to change that. In stump speeches across the country, he repeatedly hammered on the point that he and President Donald Trump have two divergent visions of American health care. “Donald Trump thinks healthcare is a privilege,” he told a crowd in Michigan on Oct. 31. “Barack [Obama] and I think it’s a right.” Implicit in Biden’s stump speech was a broader truth: the future of American health care really does hang in the balance. The results of the presidential election, combined with a hugely consequential U.S. Supreme Court case challenging the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could not only shape the American health care landscape for decades,...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news