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Healthcare: Medicare-for-all and the 2020 Election

In the 2018 midterm election, the American people went out to the polls in record numbers. Their main issue? Healthcare.

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act was passed, two years into the Obama Administration. After years of negotiations on Capitol Hill, the ACA would still prove to be a point of contention in the elections that would follow. In 2016, Republican lawmakers launched an ultimately unsuccessful effort to repeal Obamacare. This effort joins more than fifty other attempts to repeal the ACA as a failure (Berenson, 2017).

Despite their many failures, in December of 2017, Republicans earned a key victory in their crusade to end the abuses of Obamacare when President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 into law (CBO, 2017). This law ended the individual mandate, a key provision of the ACA. The individual mandate required that all individuals obtain health insurance or face a penalty. Without this mandate, the ACA essentially became ineffective.

In 2018, healthcare was once again a key issue. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, as many as 75% of voters in the 2018 midterm election said that healthcare was a "very important" issue. This proved significant as, after the midterms, the House of Representatives was flipped from Republican control to a Democratic majority.

With the 2020 election around the corner, healthcare becomes a prevalent issue once again. Many Democratic candidates favor more progressive policy, including Medicare-for-all. In fact, in 2016, Bernie Sanders was one of the major voices calling for Medicare-for-all. Now, however, he joins many other progressive Democrats in calling for Medicare-for-all. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a race in New York on a progressive, Democratic socialist platform. Now, she is one of the most prevalent voices in Congress calling for Medicare-for-all.

As 2020 looms ever-closer, the issue of healthcare becomes more and more significant. Will voters once again come out in droves to rebuke the Republican Party's stance on healthcare? Until then, anything can happen.





Sources:

Geiger, A. W. (2018, November 1). The 2018 midterms: What matters to voters? Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/01/a-look-at-voters-views-ahead-of-the-2018-midterms/

 Reconciliation Recommendations of the Senate Committee on Finance. (2017, November 27). Retrieved from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53348

 Scott, D. (2018, April 13). A requiem for the individual mandate. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/13/17226566/obamacare-penalty-2018-individual-mandate-still-in-effect

Geiger, A. W. (2018, November 1). The 2018 midterms: What matters to voters? Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/01/a-look-at-voters-views-ahead-of-the-2018-midterms/
Reconciliation Recommendations of the Senate Committee on Finance. (2017, November 27). Retrieved from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53348
Scott, D. (2018, April 13). A requiem for the individual mandate. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/13/17226566/obamacare-penalty-2018-individual-mandate-still-in-effect
Geiger, A. W. (2018, November 1). The 2018 midterms: What matters to voters? Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/01/a-look-at-voters-views-ahead-of-the-2018-midterms/
Reconciliation Recommendations of the Senate Committee on Finance. (2017, November 27). Retrieved from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53348
Scott, D. (2018, April 13). A requiem for the individual mandate. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/13/17226566/obamacare-penalty-2018-individual-mandate-still-in-effect

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