Health care, Medicare will pose major challenges to the winner

The victor of the presidential contest will face huge policy decisions including how to maintain Medicare's solvency and whether to implement the 2010 health law. News outlets analyze where President Barack Obama and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney stand on these issues.

Los Angeles Times: Central Issues Of Election 2012
Whoever wins the presidential elec­tion in November will confront urgent problems. ... What follows is our best ef­fort to make clear where Obama and Romney stand on several major domestic and foreign policy issues that will face whichever man wins. ... Medicare poses knottier problems. Not only has the number of recipients increased, but the costs per person have gone up as medical care has gotten pricier. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicare spending will go up more than 6% a year for the next decade. That's why the most consequential disagreements between the candidates regarding federal spending involve healthcare (Lauter, 10/13).

The Wall Street Journal: To the Winner: Good Luck-;You'll Need It
Social Security and Medicare, most agree, are on unsustainable fiscal ground. Taxes will have to be raised, and spending reined in, to ensure the systems stay solvent. This is a major item on your to-do list. But here's the problem. There's only so much you can cut, because 80 million baby boomers are starting to retire (Arends, 10/13).

Medpage Today: Obama Wins If Health Care Is Key Concern
Voters who walk into a polling place with health care on their minds are likely to cast their votes for President Obama, according to a report by a group of Harvard health policy analysts. For example, among likely voters who say that "healthcare and Medicare" are the most important issues in their vote, 41 percent said they were much less likely to vote for a candidate who supported repealing all or part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as Mitt Romney has said he would do, according to Robert J. Blendon, ScD, of the Harvard School of Public Health, and colleagues. "Health care is playing a greater role in this presidential election than in many other recent ones," they noted in a special report published online in the New England Journal of Medicine (Frieden, 10/12).