President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are heading to Atlanta for a presidential campaign debate set to start at 9 p.m. Thursday. For viewers with an interest in health insurance and employee benefits, the debate will be a kind of high-stakes policymaking bingo game, with points given for each mention of issues such as prescription drug costs, Medicare Advantage plan rules and differences in states' health insurance rules. One difference between this debate and others held in the television era is that Biden and Trump have both been president. They can point to what they, and their opponents, have actually done while in office, not simply talk about what they'd like to do. For our assessment of how likely different topics are to come up and what the candidates might say, see the gallery above.
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To develop the predictions here, we relied heavily on transcripts from previous debates, Agend47 policy statements on the official Trump campaign website, a health policy summary on the official Biden campaign website and news reports. Note that one difference between this bingo game and a real bingo game is that the odds of a specific health policy topic coming up vary from topic to topic. In a standard bingo game, the odds that the dealer will draw any given number are the same for each number.
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