Medicare-for-All

As health care costs rise, more Americans are voicing support for a single-payer system: Fifty-three percent now support such a plan, compared with less than 40 percent in the early 2000s. Both parties have noted the trend. Republicans are scared enough by the prospect that Mr. Trump wrote a scathing and wildly inaccurate op-ed in USA Today, denouncing the concept.

Democrats, for their part, advocate a range of single-payer options that include true Medicare-for-All — which would expand the existing government program to cover everyone — and a “public option” that would allow people to opt in to Medicare. So far, details on each are fuzzy; it remains to be seen how various such proposals would grapple with costs, consumer choice and doctor pay. Vermont’s single-payer experiment, for instance, largely failed because it ran out of money. But if Democrats take the House, expect to see a lot of pressure from the progressive end of the party to introduce legislation. Only then will we see how single-payer might actually play out, and by 2020, whether voters are truly willing to go down that path.

Pre-existing Condition Protections

Republicans have long insisted that they want to protect people with pre-existing conditions from insurance discrimination — just not through the Affordable Care Act. This is not, by itself, an indefensible position. The current law provides ironclad protections to people with serious medical conditions, but it also has forced a lot of the burden of that coverage onto the shoulders of middle-income Americans who earn too much to qualify for the law’s subsidies and whose premiums and deductibles are now soaring.

But it’s tough to argue that one is for pre-existing condition protections when one is actively fighting the only federal law to ever have guaranteed those protections in the first place. There may well be a better way to prevent insurance companies from discriminating against the sick — one that doesn’t price middle-class Americans out of the market. But so far, Republicans have not found it.

One of their more recent proposals would require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, but would allow the insurers to exclude coverage of the condition itself — so it would be possible for a given person to be covered, even while their cancer relapse is not. Other suggestions include having the federal government pick up the tab for pre-existing condition coverage. But so far, those offerings range from vague to inadequate.

Far more concrete are the many ways that Republicans have sought to undermine pre-existing condition protections over the past two years, including by trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act itself.

Prescription Drug Costs

Donald Trump took office on a promise to dramatically lower the cost of prescription medicine. Since then, Mr. Trump and Congress have made only minimal progress on this goal. They’ve abolished gag rules that prohibit pharmacists from advising customers on how to pay less for prescriptions, and cracked down on drug companies that try to block cheaper, generic versions of their product from making it to market. But neither of those measures, nor any of the others that Mr. Trump has proposed as the election draws near, are likely to make much of a dent in what average consumers pay at the pharmacy counter.