Tornado Alley (PROG)

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B402 - Republicans are keeping health care at arms length this election

Analysis by Rachel Roubein
with research by McKenzie Beard

September 23, 2022 at 7:53 a.m. EDT

The Health 202

Happy Friday y’all. We love a good waffle, but we have some questions for Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Send us your unpopular takes: [e-mail]. 

Today’s edition: The Justice Department says it will defend Veterans Affairs medical workers who perform an abortion in certain instances. A judge in Indiana temporarily blocked the state’s near-total ban on abortion. But first … 

Republicans are staying vague on health policy in the midterms

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) will unveil his party's campaign season agenda today. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Republicans have spent plenty of elections promising to ditch Obamacare
and overhaul the U.S. health-care system. Not anymore. 

When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) formally rolls out his campaign season agenda today at an event in Pennsylvania, it will be light on health policy details. The one-page document — called a “Commitment to America” — is vague, pointing to broad ideas like price transparency and competition, instead of a bold vision for the future of health reform.

That’s by design. As one conservative health expert put it, the GOP still has
“PTSD” from its failed effort in 2017 to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Health care has repeatedly shown to be a toxic issue for Republicans. In just the last couple of months, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) walked back comments suggesting he wants to see Republicans take another crack at repealing Obamacare; Don Bolduc, New Hampshire’s GOP Senate nominee, backtracked after saying he’d like to privatize Medicare; and the campaign of Blake Masters, Republican candidate in Arizona, removed references to strict antiabortion positions from his website.

Roughly 77 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters say health care is “very important” to their vote in the 2022 congressional election. But just 43 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters agree. And Democrats recently passed a popular health measure allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some drugs, which polls show a broad swath of voters support.

“Democrats have historically maintained a sizable advantage on the issue of health care,” said Ken Spain, who worked at the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2010, the year the GOP won the majority. “For the midterm elections, Republicans don’t have to win on the issue … but they cannot get destroyed over it. They must find a way to close the gap and the key to doing so is by talking about cost and quality of care.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/23/republicans-are-keeping-health-care-arms-length-this-election/

So much for your conservative trolling claim that Republicans care more for health issues than Democrats.

As for the content of your post : The world is coming out of pandemic conditions. Of course the system and employees are stressed. We
all understand that. And while not taking away at all from the nurses' cause you could go back decades and find similar complaints.

It's no different in Australia or other western countries. And in every single one of those countries
you would find liberals are more concerned with health sector issues than conservatives.