It's the Healthcare, Stupid

Horror stories about the American healthcare system surface almost every day. Perhaps the most dystopian illustration of this is the fact that GoFundMe pages to help people with medical bills have become depressingly ritualistic. So it’s not that surprising that in the upcoming 2018 midterms, healthcare is the bread and butter issue that Americans care about the most.

New polling out from Reuters/Ipsos on Monday reinforces this fact. In March, respondents ranked healthcare as the most pressing issue facing the country today. Almost half surveyed see their healthcare as “not very” affordable or worse.

Reuters also found that college-educated voters over 60, a group that was more likely to vote Republican in 2016, has swung the opposite way in 2018. At the same time, the number of educated older adults who ranked healthcare as their top issue shot up from 8% to 21%.

Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare three times over the past year-and-a-half, and succeeded in wounding it through the tax bill. Yet a number of contested swing districts saw large gains in insurance coverage under Obamacare. Healthcare is a winning issue for Democrats around the country, and these numbers should strike a bolt of fear in the heart of the Republican Party.