GOP candidates in key Senate races have not bothered to tell voters about their opponents’ hostility to Medicare Advantage.
GOP candidates in key Senate races have not bothered to tell voters about their opponents’ hostility to Medicare Advantage.
I n three competitive Senate races — the ones in Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota — Republicans are throwing away an opportunity.
In each of those races, the Democrats are running a candidate who is hostile to Medicare Advantage, which lets senior citizens choose a private company to deliver their Medicare benefits. The Democratic candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, co-authored a book on Medicare for All that says that people on Medicare Advantage will have to “transition” to the new government-run insurance system, with no opt-outs allowed. In Maine, Troy Jackson promises that if elected, he would support and cosponsor the Bernie Sanders Medicare for All bill, which abolishes Medicare Advantage as an option. Peggy Flanagan, running in Minnesota, says she “cannot wait to go to the United States Senate and join Bernie Sanders to pass Medicare for all.”
Medicare Advantage enrollees make up 15, 19, and 20 percent of the voting-age population in Minnesota, Michigan, and Maine, respectively. These are people who have chosen to receive their Medicare benefits from providers other than the traditional Medicare bureaucracy. That option would no longer be available to them if the Democratic candidates had their way.
Yet Republicans have not bothered to tell any of these voters about it. In Minnesota, Republican candidate Michele Tafoya has called Medicare for All an unaffordable “pipe dream” — but has not noted in a debate or in ads that this popular option for senior citizens would disappear under Medicare for All. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s opponent, has said that expanding Medicare to the entire population would endanger seniors’ benefits. He has not mentioned that El-Sayed wants to abolish Medicare Advantage. An ad against Jackson highlights that Medicare for All would eliminate the private insurance plans that unions have negotiated — but doesn’t mention Medicare Advantage or senior citizens.
One can only speculate about why Republicans have kept silent about this issue. They may think that other issues offer more promise in the campaigns. Rogers, for example, seems much more comfortable talking about El-Sayed’s views on the Middle East. But there’s no reason to focus on only one issue, and anyway Rogers has surely gotten closer to the point of diminishing returns on national security issues than he has on Medicare Advantage.
Republican campaigns may also worry that raising this issue would lead to questions about what their own health-care policy is — but their alternative on this specific point could be as simple as not abolishing Medicare Advantage.
I suspect the underlying reason Republicans have not hit this issue is the party’s longstanding lack of interest in health policy. In general, the party’s candidates and strategists dislike talking about health policy. They tend not to know much about it and not to want to learn more. I would not be surprised to learn that key Republican decisionmakers in each of these races are unaware that the Democratic candidates are against Medicare Advantage. And so they are leaving the affected voters unaware, too.