HMPI

A Special 2026 Elections Issue: The Candidates' Stand on Healthcare

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Health Management, Policy and Innovation (HMPI) — an independent, peer-reviewed, open-access journal — features actionable, business-based insights to address challenges faced by healthcare organizations worldwide. Published by the Business School Alliance for Health Management (BAHM), HMPI invites original translational research papers, analyses, and commentaries that are written by and for industry practitioners, policymakers, faculty, students, and journalists.

Current Issue:

Because healthcare has emerged as a key affordability topic in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, we are highlighting a new analysis on how the public's views on healthcare are reflected in the candidates' campaigns.

An Original Research Article

The Healthcare Policies of the November 2026 Candidates

David Scheinker, Stanford Medicine, Maya Shah, University of Vermont, Anton Backer, Grouper Education, Kevin Schulman, Stanford Medicine

Most American adults rate healthcare as their top affordability concern, and they support fundamental redesign or major changes to our healthcare system. Are the candidates running for office in November 2026 addressing those concerns?

To answer those questions and more, Stanford researchers analyzed the healthcare issues and policy proposals of the candidates in the House, Senate and gubernatorial races. They found that only half of nearly 1,000 campaign websites (51% overall, 73% Democratic, and 28% Republican) mentioned any of the six issues that explicitly concern affordability: drug pricing, insurance premiums, hospital prices and price transparency, surprise billing, medical debt, and healthcare costs in general.

Reproductive health and abortion access was mentioned on 53% of sites, followed by Medicare on 44%, mental health on 41%, and prescription drug pricing on 40% of websites.

This is the first systematic, openly available database and analysis of the healthcare policies and proposals of the leading candidates in November 2026 and beyond. The list of candidates, their campaign websites, the quotes used to code their position on each issue, and their policy proposal, are available as raw data for download and through healthcarepolicies.org, which will be maintained and updated for this and future elections.

Read the article

Some Key Findings
The Research Behind the Data

For each November 2026 race, researchers identified the top two candidates by probability of victory on Polymarket. From each candidate's official campaign website, they coded which healthcare issues were explicitly mentioned and, for those mentioned, the candidate's position, as well as any specific proposals. All sites were initially coded using AI, a sample of 360 coded responses was manually reviewed, all sites were then again coded by AI. Finally, two AI models each audited the other’s coding. Mistakes and changes were logged along with a quote from the website to support the finding. They compared results by issue, party, office, state, and by race competitiveness as rated by the Cook Political Report.