Joe Biden
Providing American citizens with affordable healthcare was the primary objective of Barack Obama. With his Affordable Care Act, he partially solved the issue. However, the challenge of receiving healthcare services persists because of high costs. Joe Biden, who is running for president, aims to use the Affordable Care Act as the basis for his prospective healthcare program (Biden). He plans to give all Americans access to affordable insurance by creating a public health insurance program like Medicare, and decreasing the premiums by increasing tax credits that may be used to cover premiums (Biden). He also states that low-income Americans will be provided with premium-free healthcare, but does not indicate how this program will be financed.
Biden has additional proposals for cutting healthcare costs, such as stopping surprise medical billing and partnering with the healthcare workforce. However, high costs of healthcare are not due to a disorganized workforce or continuous surprise billing, but because of a few corporations that set empyreal prices to increase their profitability (Biden). Biden says that he will battle these companies with the help of antitrust law, and it will be the most critical confrontation on the path to affordable healthcare.
Prescription drugs are costly in the United States, and citizens should be allowed to buy them from abroad. That is because local corporations do not face any competition from manufacturers in other countries and can set high prices (Biden). The same prescription drugs are almost ten times cheaper in Canada than in the U.S. Therefore, Americans should be given the privilege to import foreign prescription drugs.
Access to healthcare should be the right of every citizen, and only expanding access to contraception, or only reducing maternal mortality rate will not have a holistic impact. Instead, the government should invest more in community health centers that can provide citizens with essential health services and prenatal assistance (Biden). Community health centers are generally cheaper than private hospitals but may meet the needs of many Americans. Therefore, Biden’s proposal of doubling the investment in these centers is the most appealing.
Elizabeth Warren
Mrs. Warren plans to take a holistic approach to solve both economic problems and issues with healthcare costs. She believes that the primary reason why many Americans go broke and cannot afford essentials is that the government has started to favor the wealthier part of the population more than the rest (Warren). Along with reducing the prices of prescription drugs and increasing access to healthcare, Warren plans to raise wages, decrease the price of education, child care, and housing. She believes the plan will be completed in her first term, and therefore is the best.
While anti-corruption reforms may seem the most attractive, they are rarely achievable in a short period. The country may need an additional one hundred years to get rid of corruption entirely. Immediately lowering costs and canceling Trump’s programs that harm Americans is the most feasible option from the list of her prospective actions during her first 100 days of the presidency (Warren). Besides that, citizens will immediately start feeling the impact of cost reductions because many low-income Americans will be granted access to healthcare.
For a system to work properly, all of its elements must act according to what was written in an initial plan. When a single entity is corrupted, it jeopardizes the whole system. Therefore, it is critical to confront corruption even though it may take a very long time. In the United States, corruption has become legal because of lobbying. Any company with enough money may influence politicians and tempt them into making decisions that favor the company and not ordinary citizens. Therefore, Warren’s plan of banning lobbying is the best proposal.
Mrs. Warren believes that it is essential to bring down drug prices, and she is correct because the majority of the American population cannot afford life-critical drugs only because of corporate greed. She states that she will have several tools at her disposal – bypassing patents, Bayh-Dole Act, and lead the government into manufacturing the generic drugs to increase competition (Warren). Out of these three, bypassing patents is the most attractive because the majority of high-priced drugs are relatively new and are expensive because of patent costs. Decreasing the prices of these new drugs will grant low-income Americans the treatment of previously untreatable diseases such as Hepatitis C.
Compare and Contrast
Both plans plan to reduce drug prices that are currently very high. The candidates also want to expand Medicare to all citizens of the United States so that everybody has access to affordable healthcare. While Biden plans to reduce prices by pressuring healthcare companies, Warren wants to ban lobbying so that corporations do not pay politicians for favorable decisions. Biden’s program will allow citizens to import drugs from abroad to increase competition, whereas Warren plans to bypass patents and make the government produce generic drugs. Despite Biden’s attractive proposals, Warren’s plan seems to be more feasible because the plan contains more details, and goals are more realistic than Biden’s objectives.
Works Cited
Biden, Joe. “Health Care.” Biden President, 2019. Web.
Warren, Elizabeth. “My First Term Plan for Reducing Health Care Costs in America and Transitioning to Medicare for All.” Warren, 2019. Web.