The time of presidential candidates giving little attention to health care is starting to change.
Joe Biden's campaign says it now has a $65 million health care campaign underway. The campaign includes two ads that feature President Trump’s efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act.
An ad running in North Carolina features a mother with her son, who has leukemia. If the Affordable Care Act is abolished, the mother says, “we would have to be making some tough decision about which medicines we could afford.”
“I think he’s going back to a playbook that really worked for Democrats in 2018 and tailoring it in a way that sort of folds in the events of the pandemic,” says Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of the political site FiveThirtyEight. “We’ll just have to see if it resonates in the same way for voters now.”
The ad never mentions the Affordable Care Act. But it gets to the health care issues which polls show are worrying many Americans: The high cost of medicine and the fear that a major medical problem will mean economic catastrophe.
It “touches on the economic insecurity that a lot of people are feeling right now,” says Thomson-DeVeaux. “This is a message that’s clearly tailored to reach a broader swath of voters than just Democrats who are already very much in favor of the Affordable Care Act.”
The health care ads will run in broadcast and digital media in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida and Nevada – a list which includes 2020 election battleground states.
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