This November, Choose Wisely on Healthcare

(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party or candidate on the part of Newsmax.)

Election Day is just two months away.

And yes, you can bet healthcare is on the ballot, as it should be.

Polling from Pew earlier this year found that the affordability of healthcare was the No. 3 problem in the United States.

And the two political parties have wildly different approaches to solving that problem.

The Democrats believe that subjecting more of our healthcare system to government control is the answer.

Republicans argue that competition, free markets, and private-sector ingenuity can bring about better care at lower cost.

The Democrats have occupied the White House for 12 of the last 16 years. In that time, the cost of healthcare has only gone up. That's evidence enough that the big government model of healthcare reform doesn't work.

Yet the Democrats' nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, is promising to double-down on the health policy disaster known as Obamacare.

She's called for extending the generous premium subsidies signed into law by President Joe Biden that have saddled taxpayers with tens of billions of dollars in new spending.

These premium tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of next year, made Obamacare exchange plans effectively free for Americans earning up to 150% of the federal poverty level — just under $47,000 for a family of four.

They also saw to it that no one pays more than 8.5% of income on coverage, regardless of how much money they make.

These generous taxpayer subsidies wouldn't have been necessary had Obamacare's mandates and rules not caused premiums to surge in recent years.

Average monthly individual premiums in 2013, the year before the exchanges opened, were $244. This year, KFF reports the average benchmark premium at $477.

Rather than address the underlying causes of these premium hikes, the Biden administration has given billions in public subsidies to insurers to hide them.

Harris supports making those tax credits permanent — and at astounding cost. According to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, such a move would increase the country's budget deficit by $335 billion between 2025 and 2034.

Trump, on the other hand, has signaled that he would not renew these premium subsidies. As one of his campaign spokespeople recently put it, Trump would "make healthcare actually affordable" — which, of course, is the right idea.

To that end, there's no shortage of market-oriented policies to choose from — including a roll-back of Obamacare's cost-inflating mandates and the establishment of high-risk pools in which especially sick patients could get affordable coverage without driving up premiums in the rest of the insurance market.

Harris has also been a vocal supporter of drug price controls.

She even cast the tie-breaking "yea" in the party-line vote in 2022 that implemented price controls that take effect for 10 drugs covered by Medicare Part D in 2026. Here too, she displays a penchant for heavy-handed government intervention over the dynamism of the free market.

After all, America's pharmaceutical sector is a textbook example of how the right incentives can reward ingenuity and risk-taking in ways that save lives.

Spending on pharmaceutical research and development is near all-time highs, reaching almost $101 billion in 2022.

Drug firms have been willing to invest so aggressively because they are confident a successful medicine will have a chance to recoup those investments in the marketplace.

Harris' price controls would throw this arrangement into disarray and cause investment in new cures to dry up. University of Chicago economist Tomas Philipson estimates that the Biden-Harris administration's price controls will cause research and development spending to decline by $663 billion through 2039. That will result in 135 fewer new drug approvals.

Trump, by contrast, understands the importance of competition to a functioning health sector. In 2019, he signed an executive order requiring hospitals to report publicly the actual prices they charge patients and insurers for a wide range of procedures, services and treatments.

There's a stark division between the two presidential hopefuls on healthcare — an issue that is a matter of life and death for most Americans.

The Democrat supports near-bottomless government spending and price controls that will result in fewer life-saving medical breakthroughs and long waits for care.

The Republican wants to leverage the power of market competition to drive down prices, improve quality, and encourage entrepreneurs to bet big on medical innovation.

One can only hope America's voters decide wisely.