Healthcare is the top issue for many heading into the midterm elections, and particularly for Democratic voters, according to a new report.
In the Kaiser Family Foundation's latest tracking poll of about 1,200 people, 30% said healthcare was the most important issue in this election. By comparison, 21% said the economy and jobs was their top issue, while 15% said gun laws or immigration were their biggest concerns.
Democrats and independents were more likely to rate healthcare as a central issue, with 40% of Democrats and 31% of independents citing it was their most important issue in 2018. Just 17% of Republicans said the same, putting it behind immigration and the economy and on par with gun laws.
Even with the partisan split, though, healthcare is a hot-button issue. More than 70% of those polled said it was at least “very important” to them in the upcoming election. KFF has “regularly found healthcare among the top issues voters want to hear candidates talk about during their campaigns,” the researchers said.
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The poll looked specifically at data from Florida and Nevada, two states that are bellwethers on political attitudes. In both states, overwhelmingly the biggest healthcare concern was insurance coverage protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
Sixty-nine percent of polled Florida voters and 68% of polled Nevada voters said they would prefer a candidate that wants to keep those protections in place, while just 9% of Floridians and 8% of Nevadans said they would favor a candidate who is seeking to ax those protections.
Floridians also favored expanding Medicaid, according to the report, with 59% saying the program should be broadened. By contrast, 34% said Medicaid should remain as is, figures KFF said track with other non-expansion states.
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That voters in competitive states favor these policies is notable, as Republicans in the Senate are poised for another attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act, which established the protections and allowed states to expand their Medicaid programs.
Republicans, instead, appear to be gearing up to take on the ACA again after election season.
President Donald Trump's economic adviser Larry Kudlow said this week that the administration expects to address deficits, in part, by going after Obamacare rather than large entitlement programs, the Washington Examiner reported.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Reuters Wednesday that the Senate’s failure to repeal the law last year was a “disappointment." He and other colleagues such as Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, have said they intend to return to repeal options.
“If we had the votes to completely start over, we’d do it,” McConnell, R-Kentucky, said. “But that depends on what happens in a couple weeks … We’re not satisfied with the way Obamacare is working.”
McConnell also defended a Texas lawsuit, which is led by red states and backed by the White House, that claims the entire ACA should be thrown out as Congress repealed the individual mandate in its tax cuts last year, rendering the law unconstitutional on the whole.
“I don’t fault the administration for trying to give us an opportunity to do this differently and go in a different direction,” the senator told Bloomberg. “Nothing wrong with going to court. Americans do it all the time; we can do it too.”
The lawsuit, which would end the popular protections for pre-existing conditions, is a central focus in many Democratic political ads. McConnell said Republican candidates are “able to deal with” the attacks and that the pre-existing condition protections are uniformly popular in the Senate.