Health costs are fueling voter stress — and Democratic campaigns

ATLANTA– President Donald Trump’s second term has presented a range of opportunities for political opponents, from immigration crackdowns and persistent inflation to attacks on independent institutions and friction with foreign allies.

But many Democrats remain focused on health care, an issue that was once a political liability but has become fundamental to the party in recent elections. They insist their strategy will help the party regain control of Congress in the midterm elections and fare better than making headlines about the latest White House scandals.

Last year, Republicans cut about $1 trillion over a decade in Medicaid and refused to expand COVID-era subsidies that had reduced the cost of Affordable Care Act health plans.

In response, Democrats are filming campaign spots outside struggling hospitals, spotlighting Americans facing rising insurance premiums and sharing their own personal health care stories.

Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the party’s most threatened incumbents this year, is expected to highlight health care challenges at a campaign rally Saturday in suburban Atlanta.

“This is a real problem for Democrats,” said Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist and executive director of the advocacy group Protect Our Care. “I think this will be part of every campaign, up and down the ballot.”

Republicans are defending their votes as curbing rising health care costs and combating waste, fraud and abuse, and Trump recently launched a new website to help patients buy prescription drugs at a discount. However, the party has so far been unable to pass comprehensive legislation to offset Americans’ healthcare costs, despite controlling both houses of Congress.

Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, said the issue would remain his party’s “Achilles heel” until its leaders develop realistic proposals that can be turned into law.

Health care was once considered a political liability for the left.

In 2010, Democrats lost their majority in the House after President Barack Obama’s signature health policy, the ACA, passed without a single Republican vote. In 2014, they abandoned the Senate, a year after the Obama administration botched its Healthcare.gov rollout.

But those winds reversed when President Donald Trump “hit the stove” during his first term, Woodhouse said. The Republican president supported efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, which would have left millions without insurance and made it harder for those with pre-existing conditions to access coverage.

Although the legislation did not pass, health care has since become a thorny issue for Republicans, a weakness that deepened last year when lawmakers passed a bill expected to cut more than $1 trillion over a decade from federal health care and food assistance, largely by imposing work requirements on those receiving aid and shifting some costs onto states.

Republicans said the move would prevent abuse of the Medicaid program, and they added a $50 billion investment in rural health to offset losses. But that hasn’t stopped Democratic groups from attacking. Unrig Our Economy, a left-leaning group, said that since the start of 2025 it has spent more than $12 million on ads criticizing Republicans on health care.

Democrats saw another opportunity to win voter support last year, when the ACA’s enhanced tax credits were about to expire, and they forced a government shutdown over the issue. Funding has not been restored, but the party believes it has gained political clout in this year’s campaigns.

“Republicans now own it,” said Eric Stern, a Democratic media strategist. “You better believe the Democrats are going to talk about this.”

Stef Feldman, a Democratic consultant who served as an aide to former President Joe Biden, said she has heard candidates say that voters care about health care affordability “more than anything else.”

A recent survey from KFF, a nonprofit health care research organization, confirms this observation. The study found that about a third of U.S. adults are “very worried” about the cost of health care, compared with about a quarter who feel the same way about the cost of groceries, housing or utilities.

For Iowa State Sen. Zach Wahls, running for U.S. Senate this year, addressing these concerns has meant visits to vulnerable hospitals and pharmacies. For Wisconsin candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives Rebecca Cooke, that meant sitting down with hospital executives and telling personal stories, including about her father’s expensive prostate cancer medications and the $200 increase in her own ACA premiums.

Ossoff, the only Democratic senator seeking re-election this year in a state won by Trump in 2024, called health care a “life and death issue” in a recent campaign video.

At her Saturday rally, one of the expected speakers is Teresa Acosta, who often supports Democratic candidates. She said her ACA policy, which covers her and two teenagers, including a son with Type 1 diabetes, now costs $520 a month, seven times more than before the expanded subsidies were removed.

“I think most people would agree that health care is a human right,” Acosta said. “And the Republicans seem determined to weaken access to it. »

ACA plans are widely used in Georgia, as it is one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid. As a result, advocates have warned that the expiration of the ACA’s expanded subsidies could leave Georgia residents without insurance. Recent federal data shows that about 14% fewer Georgians signed up for plans in 2026 compared to last year, although those numbers are not yet final.

U.S. Reps. Mike Collins and Buddy Carter, two of Ossoff’s primary Republican opponents, voted in January against a temporary extension of the ACA tax credit that passed the House but languished in the Senate. Both ridicule the ACA as the “Unaffordable Care Act,” a phrase used by Trump, and favor a narrower Republican alternative.

Carter, who worked as a pharmacist, said an extension amounted to “pushing more money into a broken system, riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, without addressing the root cause of skyrocketing costs.”

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican who fended off a challenge from Cooke, was one of 17 Republicans who voted for the temporary extension. He said he didn’t support the subsidies but had to vote that way to protect his constituents, pointing out that Democrats set the expiration date in the first place.

However, Van Orden also criticized his own party for letting tax credits expire without another solution in place.

“For the last 15 years, when you talked about health care, they would dive out the window, jump into a bush and hide,” Van Orden said. “We are the party of good policy, so we should write policy and we should accept it.”

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Swenson reported from New York.