As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump face off in their first general election debate on Thursday, health policy experts say tackling exorbitant health care costs is as top of mind for voters as the U.S. economy.
Health care costs in the United States continue to rise, with more Americans saying they can’t afford the care they need.
Drew Altman, president and CEO of KFF, a nonprofit that studies health policy issues, said there is no issue in health care that even remotely resembles voter frustration over the high costs patients have to pay for care.
“People tend to think of health care as something separate from the economy,” he said, “but when you talk to voters, health care isn’t something separate at all in their minds. Health care is an aspect of the economic concerns of their wallets.”
National health care spending is projected to grow 7.5% to nearly $4.8 trillion in 2023, faster than the economy as a whole is projected to grow. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Estimated per capita health care spending (the average amount spent on health care services per person) reaches $14,423 in 2023, up from $13,493 in 2022 and $13,012 in 2021.
Rising medical costs are taking a toll on Americans’ wallets, with nearly half of U.S. adults saying they have difficulty paying their medical bills. Recent KFF pollNearly one in four people say they or a family member had trouble paying medical bills in the past year.
This often means that needed treatments have to be skipped or delayed, said Dr. Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance who was not involved in the poll. While one family member may try to help financially, trying to help someone else can sometimes exacerbate problems for the whole family, such as medical debt, he added.
“Health care costs are one of the most significant economic issues for American families,” he said. “Health care costs will be one of the largest expenditures for many families, especially those with children and older adults with chronic illnesses.”
No fundamental reforms
Although President Trump has again threatened to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, major health care reform is unlikely to be a central issue at the debate, Altman said.
Biden is likely to tout the Curb Inflation Act of 2022, which he signed into law.
Among the provisions is one that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with drug companies for the first time. Earlier this year, the government began negotiating prices for the 10 most expensive prescription drugs covered by Medicare, including heart and diabetes drugs. The government is expected to announce new negotiated prices by September 1.
Earlier this month, the administration also announced plans to eliminate debt from health care reports.
Beyond Obamacare and abortion, Trump has offered few details about what a second term might entail. He made tackling the high cost of prescription drugs a pillar of his last term, including allowing states to import drugs from Canada and instituting rules that would tie prices for certain drugs to the prices countries abroad pay.
Robin Feldman, a law professor and director of the Innovation Center at the University of California, San Francisco School of Law, said the biggest challenge for both Biden and Trump will be coming up with a health care policy that both sides in Congress can support.
“The concepts of unity and compromise seem to be a distant memory in Congress, as well as across the country,” she said.
“In recent years, ideas for big, sweeping reform have seemed unlikely to materialize,” Gaffney said.
Breakthrough reform remains difficult but important.
“It pisses me off that we’re making a distinction between health care and economic issues at this point, because to real people, there’s no distinction,” Altman said. “This is one of their biggest economic concerns.”
