November 12, 2019
THE rIGHT VS A RIGHT:
Medicaid will Shape the 2020 Election. Are Republicans Ready? (DANIEL MCGRAW, NOVEMBER 12, 2019, The Bulwark)
Last week, former Obama healthcare administrator Andy Slavitt called healthcare the "kryptonite to beat President Donald Trump" in a Washington Post op-ed column. Newly elected Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat in a blood-red state, used the Republican attacks on some Medicaid provisions of healthcare as the bellwether topic in his upset win. Beshear called Medicaid a "basic human right and our administration will treat it as such" and beat the Republican incumbent.The issue moves beyond Kentucky. In an extensive poll released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Cook Political Report on voter opinion in four key Midwest swing states (Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), the report found that voters in those states rated healthcare as one of the only issues in which President Trump's approval rating (-21) is lower than his overall job approval (-18)."These are tough numbers [for Trump] if the Democrats can capitalize on them," political analyst Charlie Cook said of the poll in a TV interview. What was perhaps most telling in Cook's poll was that the number of voters in those four states who had healthcare as their top priority (20-22%), lined up almost identically with the percentage of those who identified themselves as undecided independents (21-25%).
And, despite the partisan polarization surrounding the topic, 60% of the public says providing health care is a government responsibility.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 12, 2019 12:00 AM