Please also see "Why Hillary is better than Trump" arguments, dissected: SCOTUS for the first in this series.

Note: These essays are critical of the "Support Hillary because X" arguments. The intent is to dissect and examine them on the merits, and expose their weaknesses if any. I have a bias in that I'm a #BernieOrBust person. I won't vote for Hillary, and I find the arguments I'm critiquing unconvincing in aggregate. Individual arguments may have some merit, but taken altogether I believe they don't. These essays are meant to explore how and why I have come to that conclusion.

Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the most important issues we face. Throughout the primary contest Hillary grafted herself to Obama's achievement and promised to expand it if elected POTUS.

Trump, as usual, is all over the place but his rhetoric that isn't word salad on the matter can safely be put in the "repeal and (maybe) replace" category, given that the GOP is what it is. His candidate website has a list that is more or less the same re-heated agenda we've heard for the last 8 years or so: repeal "Obamacare", remove regulations preventing interstate sale of health insurance, reform Medicaid, and introduce new regulations at various points in the "delivery pipeline." Here is a bullet-point summary of what will happen if Trump is successful:

1. Young adults (up to age 26) will no longer have access to their parents' care plans
2. Pre-existing condition exclusions will return
3. Medicaid will be harder to qualify for (due to the lower income/wealth limits) and it will suffer under a block grants style system that has helped destroy welfare
4. Subsidies for plans on the exchanges will disappear, because the exchanges will disappear
5. An impossible regulation on health care providers ('price transparency') will effectively mean they cannot participate in insurance plans (providers can't provide price transparency because the insurance companies whose plans they take can't)
6. Americans could import pharmaceuticals

About the only good thing on that list is the last item. Love or hate Obamacare (I'm more the latter), it's better than what Trump proposes. The removal of pre-existing condition regulations and severing of 26-and-unders from access to parents' plans would alone be enough to oppose Trump's plans. Medicaid is still too hard to qualify for. Under the pre-ACA system it was impossible for people who actually needed it to access it unless they became effectively asset-less street people. Trump's plan is just almost uniformly bad.

On the other side, taking Hillary at face-value, we should believe that she will more or less double-down on Obamacare. That was one of her mendacious attacks on Sanders, even: she wants to defend and build on Obamacare, he wants to "repeal and replace" it. Her issues page and campaign rhetoric are mostly in alignment. Her plans aren't as detailed as Trump's, and in fact her issues page tends to repeat the same two or three things in different phrasing. To summarize her proposals:

1. She wants to provide a tax credit for expenses above 5% of one's income to help offset high premiums/expenses
2. She'd allow families who have employer plans that are "too expensive" to use the exchanges
3. Create utilities, such as a "navigator" and engage in advertising campaigns to increase engagement (presumably under the assumption that increased participation would lead to reduced cost and is just good anyway)
4. Allow undocumented immigrants to access the exchanges

I left off "reduce the cost of prescription drugs" and "support a public option" because they're just too vague.

Taken together, none of what Hillary proposes is a significant improvement. Some of them are good for a very small slice of the population (e.g. the tax credit, which only the small fraction of people who already have the means to purchase pricey exchange programs can realistically access). Some of them are just laughably absurd, like allowing undocumented immigrants to access the exchanges. It's not absurd to try to help these folks access health care, it's absurd because so few of that group could even come close to affording even the least expensive plan there.

From a political/philosophical perspective Hillary's plans are problematic on another axis: they further entrench private, multi-payer health insurance as the primary point of access for care, and therefore are in opposition to the direction of progress. ACA in its current form, and with her proposed updates to it, is a net negative in the long term for this country. It increases the power of private health insurers which further cedes control of our bodies to their actuaries.

Summary: Trump's proposals to repeal Obamacare will have a net negative impact in almost every area, on almost every person who isn't insured by an employer plan. Hillary's proposals slide us further down the path of private health insurance control over our health. In the long run, neither has proposals that are good for the country, but in the short-term do less harm than Trump's.

Verdict: Advantage Hillary. If Healthcare were the only issue, or if one considers it the most important issue, then this argument for Hillary should be convincing enough to make a final decision. If it's not the only issue, or the most important issue, it counts as a net positive in her favor.