Which presidential candidate would be best for health care?

Urology Times reached out to three urologists (selected randomly) and asked them each the following question: Which presidential candidate would be best for health care?

“I have difficulty seeing any real upside between the two candidates, from the physician perspective in general, or urology in particular. The lesser degree of uncertainty would be with Hillary Clinton because I think you would see a continuation of substantially the same policies that have been in place the last 8 years-in other words, expansion of the Affordable Care Act. It’s certainly open to debate whether that’s a good thing, but I think there would be a greater degree of predictability.

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On the opposite side of the aisle, I hear relatively nonspecific promises regarding doing away with the ACA-short on specifics, long on uncertainty. If you’re not an ACA fan, there may be some upside there. But the plans, as they exist, seem incompletely defined and therefore impossible to make any predictions from.

I don’t think much of anything is likely to change as long as it’s a divided government type of scenario. The efforts to legislatively repeal the ACA have basically been theatrical because they have no chance of actually succeeding. Those efforts would likely continue, but again pretty much theatrics.”

Justin Sausville, MD

Elkton, MD

Next: "Hillary Clinton would probably keep it more of the same; I have no idea what Donald Trump would do."

“Especially as far as the presidential candidates are concerned, Hillary Clinton would probably keep it more of the same; I have no idea what Donald Trump would do. As we get closer to the election, I hope it will get more coverage, but I don’t expect anything to change significantly unless the Republicans gain control, and then try to roll back affordable health care. We haven’t seen what the ACA can really do long term, whether it’s going to be successful or a failure. While there’s a lot of fearmongering, I’m not sure there’s any alternative proposed plan that’s going to be any better either.

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The candidates are playing their political games on people’s paychecks and being overworked, as far as anybody putting down on paper a definitive plan that sounds like it’s going to work and has been proven elsewhere. I don’t see anyone really has had a proposal out there.

Saying Clinton would be more of the same medicine isn’t necessarily a negative. The ACA may not work, but I’m not sure that it’s proven to fail yet either. I would say that if Clinton wins, the ACA will probably continue and we would see where it leads.

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There’s no question things have to change, and I think they would under either candidate. But under one, the changes would be subtler and kind of a tweaking of the ACA if it is the Democrats. Republicans would change it more drastically if they could, but I’m not sure what that means.”

Gregory Horwitz, MD

Kansas City, MO

Next: “Anything that tries to undo Obamacare before it falls flat on its face would be a good thing."

“Anything that tries to undo Obamacare before it falls flat on its face would be a good thing. I’m for portability, insurance across state lines, and increasing health savings accounts. So undoing Obamacare before it implodes and finding a way to coerce people into a single-payer system would be good. It’s never going to have enough healthy people in it to support the increased cost.

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I’m also under the impression that perhaps the ACA was never really supposed to work. It may have been more of a setup for a single-payer system.

It contained some good ideas. Having your children on your insurance for a little longer is good. I don’t know that 26 is the magic number, but that’s not wrong. But transferring costs to a smaller number of people and not incentivizing younger people to sign up is not [good]. Penalties aren’t big enough for healthy people to want to buy it until they need it. If you can buy fire insurance for your house when your house is on fire, that’s a good deal.

I don’t think insurance companies should have to take everybody, especially if they’re going to be bad stewards of their health. If companies are forced to take pre-existing conditions, then they need to be given the autonomy to say, ‘If you’re not going to participate in our wellness program and try to be less of a risk for us, then we’re going to charge you more.’ That’s called individual responsibility.

The whole idea is to have the person buying the product be a consumer instead of utilizer-have some skin in the game.”

Kevin Rier, MD

Mason City, IA

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