DISCLOSING HEALTH INFORMATION SHOULD BE MANDATORY
For all presidential candidates, disclosing key health information should be mandatory. Health is more important than age – many people function just fine well into their 80s and beyond and relative youth is no guarantee of health. (FDR died in office at just 63.)
In 1994, former president Jimmy Carter assembled a working group on presidential disabilities, said Arthur Caplan, who is head of bioethics at New York University. Carter’s group proposed that a non-partisan panel could carry out medical evaluations.
“The key variable you’re looking for is an independent assessment,” said Caplan. The evaluations could be done by a panel appointed by the National Academy of Medicine and Science, he said, or perhaps some other group seen as non-partisan.
Personal physicians tend to hold back anything a president or candidate doesn’t want disclosed, Caplan said. Consider the unconventional note Trump shared in 2016, allegedly from a doctor, claiming he “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”, with lab results that were “astonishingly excellent”.
Any private company would hold their chief executive to a higher standard. Caplan points out that Fortune 500 companies will demand health data on potential CEOs, usually requiring an independent executive physical rather than just a note from a personal physician.
