In poll after poll, health care continues to dominate voters' concerns as they look ahead to November's midterm elections. That's raising anxiety for Republican House members in plenty of surprising places, including Kentucky. Here, a Reuters-Ipsos survey including two dozen Republicans and Democrats interviewed found the issue dominating the political conversation. That makes Republican Rep. Andy Barr, who has won three times on repealing Obamacare, on shaky ground. Democrats are ready to take this one on.
Their hopes lie with voters like Joyell Anderson, who went for President Donald Trump in 2016 and said she generally votes Republican. This year, she is not sure who to support for Congress, but she knows what her top priority is: healthcare.
The 43-year-old stay-at-home mother, who suffers from diabetes, anxiety and depression, is one of more than 400,000 low-income Kentucky residents who obtained Medicaid coverage under President Barack Obama's 2010 Affordable Care Act. Barr's vote last year to repeal Obamacare scared Anderson.
In 2016, she said, her top concerns were jobs and the economy, having grown up in a family of coal miners. Now, she worries about losing Medicaid and about work requirements introduced by the state's Republican governor.
Anderson is more than just an anecdote in the 6th congressional district, where two well-financed Democrats are running for their party's nod in the May primary. One of them is Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, who is making health care his number one issue. The other, former Marine fighter pilot and mother Amy McGraths, points to Republicans' eight years of failure to repeal Obamacare and come up with a replacement that would be better.
It's making this one of the unexpectedly vulnerable districts for Republicans. That's got something to do with the major success the state's previous Democratic governor Steve Beshear achieved with Obamacare, specifically Medicaid expansion. Kentucky led the way among states in getting people newly insured, and now residents see that potentially slipping away. This coal-country district in particular, though, is hit with the double whammies of high rates of lung disease and the opioid epidemic. A Reuters analysis of Census Bureau data shows that health insurance rates rose by over 8 percentage points—twice the national average—under Beshear's administration.
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"Obamacare is a good thing,” said Jerry Harris, 66, who likes the job Trump is doing but describes himself as a Democrat. He relied on an Obamacare exchange plan before he was eligible for Medicare and has a daughter on Medicaid.
"I want to hear candidates talking about bringing down costs,” he said.
His daughter losing her Medicaid, seeing no help in his community for the addicted—those might be enough impetus for Harris to get over his Trump love and vote Democratic. Maybe. It's enough of an opening though, to make it worth it for Democrats to try.