Biden, Trump on key issues
A look at the candidates’ positions on healthcare, policing and more.
WASHINGTON — Few issues have more sharply divided Republicans and Democrats over the last decade than healthcare, and so it is with President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
The two men offer starkly different visions of what the federal government should do to ensure that Americans have access to affordable medical care.
They diverge on the 2010 Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, and on what protections health insurers must offer. They have contrasting visions of Medicare and Medicaid, the government health plans for the elderly and the poor. They take opposite approaches to reproductive health policy and abortion rights.
And they have embraced distinct visions of how to confront the coronavirus crisis, which has killed more than 200,000 people in the U.S. Trump was hospitalized for three nights with COVID-19 early this month.
Here’s what the two candidates are proposing on healthcare:
Joe Biden
Biden, who as vice president was a strong supporter of President Obama’s push to enact the Affordable Care Act, says the law’s protections should be expanded, and has called for a public option, a Medicare-like plan that would be available to Americans who cannot afford commercial insurance or live in a state that hasn’t expanded Medicaid eligibility. Biden favors increasing subsidies to help Americans buy plans on insurance marketplaces created by the 2010 law. He has indicated he would roll back Trump administration policies that loosened rules on health insurers.
Biden has a long list of proposals to control drug prices, including empowering Medicare to negotiate with drug firms. He would create a board that could assess the value of new drugs and recommend a price, a model that has effectively restrained prices in other wealthy countries. Like most Democrats, Biden has been a strong supporter of abortion rights.
On the novel coronavirus, Biden repeatedly has said he would give priority to advice from public health experts and would let them drive the national response to the pandemic. Unlike Trump, Biden has been a vocal advocate for broader use of face masks to reduce the spread of infection.
He has also said that “scientists and public health experts should decide on safety and efficacy” of any vaccine.
President Trump
Trump has offered little detail about what his healthcare agenda would look like in a second term.
Despite years of promising a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, Trump hasn’t offered any plan. His campaign website — unlike most campaigns over the last two decades — has no list of healthcare priorities.
A spokesman for the campaign declined to offer any detail about Trump’s healthcare platform. Nevertheless, Trump has offered clues about his healthcare priorities over his first term.
His administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act in its entirety and has issued regulations that allow health insurers to avoid consumer protection mandates in the law that require health plans to cover a basic set of benefits. Trump has also consistently backed major cuts to federal healthcare programs, including Medicaid.
The president has repeatedly promised to lower drug prices. With many of his initiatives on drug prices still unfulfilled, he recently directed his administration to, among other things, make it easier to import cheaper drugs from other countries. Those new efforts would not take effect until well after the election, if then.
The Trump administration has strongly backed initiatives to restrict access to abortion, to block funding for Planned Parenthood and to lift the rules that require health plans to cover contraceptives for women.
On the coronavirus, Trump has continued to call for schools and businesses to reopen and has repeatedly said he expects the virus eventually to “disappear.” His administration has pushed to fasttrack development of a vaccine. Despite the huge U.S. death toll from COVID-19, the Trump campaign points to the president’s work on the pandemic as one of his major accomplishments.