Reviewing the 2020 Democratic Candidates
Last June I reviewed the 20! Democratic candidates that participated in the debates at that time. The Iowa caucuses are on February 3rd so now is a good time to look at who is left and who's political positions have changed. If you want another version of this I recommend taking the Washington Post candidate quiz and looking at the policy charts they've created.
I've left out almost all of the categories I looked at last time except for healthcare. I left healthcare on as this is an issue where some candidates have seemed to change their stance over the last 6 months. One of the categories I left off from this new chart was gun control, all the democratic candidates support some form of gun control, including expanding background checks, while no candidate supports banning all guns.
Each candidate's name is a link to a separate post about them detailing the issues I looked at which should give more insight into why I gave them a specific mark. Here's the order of the marks:
✔>✔*>✔❓>✔❌>❓>❌
| Candidate | Education: Free College | Education: Cancel Student Debt | Economy: Tax the Rich | Economy: Living Wage | Healthcare: Single Payer | Healthcare: Public Option |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michael Bennet | ✔* | ✔❌ | ✔❌ | ✔❓ | - | ✔ |
| Joe Biden | ✔❌ | ✔❌ | ✔❓ | ✔ | - | ✔ |
| Michael Bloomberg | ❓ | ❓ | ✔* | ✔ | - | ✔ |
| Pete Buttigieg | ✔* | ✔❌ | ❓ | ✔ | - | ✔* |
| Tulsi Gabbard | ✔* | ❓ | ❓ | ✔ | - | ✔❓ |
| Amy Klobuchar | ✔❌ | ✔❌ | ❓ | ✔ | - | ✔ |
| Deval Patrick | ✔* | ✔❌ | ❓ | ✔ | - | ✔ |
| Bernie Sanders | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - |
| Tom Steyer | ✔❓ | ❓ | ✔ | ✔ | - | ✔ |
| Elizabeth Warren | ✔ | ✔* | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - |
| Andrew Yang | ❌ | ✔❓ | ✔❌ | ✔❌ | - | ❓ |
One of my concerns about single payer vs a public option that I've recently learned about is the extra cost the government may pay with a public option healthcare plan. Here's an article explaining the issue. You would think that the average cost per person in a public option plan would be the same as the single payer plan but as the article states it is quite possible that insurance companies would be able to drop high cost people, such as sick or elderly people who have more healthcare costs. These people would then use the government provided plan, bringing the average cost per person under a public option plan higher. It is true that insurance companies would have to "compete" with the government but their customers would be healthy, young, low cost people vs the sick, old, high cost people in the public option plan. A single payer plan would bring the average cost per person down and hopefully would allow for cheaper healthcare costs as the government would have more leverage when it came to health bills.