LANSING, Mich. \u2014 Christina Starks-Clay doesn\u2019t know how \u201cMedicare for All\u201d would work exactly, but she\u2019s willing to bet it\u2019d be better than what she has now.<\/p>\n
Standing in line for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed\u2019s town hall in the state\u2019s capital in September, she whipped out her phone to pull up a screenshot. It was of the $1,000 cashier\u2019s check she\u2019d picked up at the bank that day to pay down a chunk of her son\u2019s dental bills. An early childhood special education paraprofessional, she still owed $389, even with good dental insurance. Her own cleaning a few weeks before cost $600.<\/p>\n
She tried to talk herself down at the bank, to focus on being grateful for what she could afford.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018Tina, OK, you were in a position for this moment to do this,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cA lot of people couldn\u2019t do what I had to do today. I couldn\u2019t do it. But I did it. So I need to hear, how are you going to make this better for everyone?\u201d<\/p>\n
Many who waited in the hot sun that afternoon in a line stretching blocks through downtown Lansing shared similar anxieties. A man ahead of Starks-Clay talked about watching his brother rack up thousands of dollars in medical debt. A professor emeritus at nearby Michigan State University worried aloud about his grandkids\u2019 medical care, because his adult kids were struggling to meet a $9,000 insurance deductible. Healthcare workers who\u2019d turned up for the event described patients choosing between affording medication or food, or how they themselves had been financially devastated by a medical crisis.<\/p>\n
They all knew Michigan Democrat El-Sayed\u2019s rallying cry by heart, chanting it when the candidate took the stage: \u201cMoney out of politics! Money in your pocket! Medicare for All!\u201d<\/p>\n
Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.) speaks at a rally in Detroit on Aug. 7. (Emily Elconin\/Bloomberg via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Support for Medicare for All is at its highest in at least a decade, according to a new KFF poll<\/a>. The survey found two-thirds of Americans now favor expanding the government health program that largely covers seniors (about half of whom<\/a> are enrolled in private plans through Medicare Advantage).<\/p>\n But many people don\u2019t actually know how to define Medicare for All. Traditionally, the idea has been to establish a single health insurance program, run by the federal government, that would guarantee coverage for Americans and minimize or even eliminate private insurance. How much people like the idea depends on what they\u2019re told about it, pollsters have found.<\/p>\n Still, at a time when fewer than half<\/a> of Americans say they can afford their healthcare, Medicare for All has become a progressive shorthand for radical, systemic change.<\/p>\n \u201cToo many people don\u2019t have health insurance, too many people who do have insurance can\u2019t afford medical care, and many people are terrified about the costs of being sick,\u201d said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who specializes in the politics of healthcare reform.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd in an electorate that wants change, that is disenchanted with the status quo, Medicare for All is an important symbol,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Democrats running for Senate seats in the midterm elections in such states as Maine, Minnesota, and Florida tout their support for scrapping the current health insurance system in favor of broad Medicare coverage. But nowhere is the issue as central to a race as in Michigan, where Medicare for All has become synonymous with El-Sayed.<\/p>\n El-Sayed, who trained as a doctor and served as Detroit\u2019s top public health official, has campaigned on Medicare for All since his unsuccessful bid for governor in 2018. To Starks-Clay, that means he has a plan and will \u201cstick to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n That\u2019s appealing to voters right now, said Ashley Kirzinger, director of survey methodology at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. \u201cWhen we ask people what do they want to hear from candidates in regards to healthcare, it\u2019s a plan to bring down healthcare costs.\u201d<\/p>\n American Dream or Pipe Dream?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n Medicare for All has been the shiny object of progressive politics in previous campaigns, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders\u2019 2016 presidential bid and the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Its popularity rises and falls in cycles, Oberlander said. And today people are painfully aware their care is getting more expensive and harder to access.<\/p>\n In the first decade or so after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the nation\u2019s uninsured rate was cut nearly in half<\/a>. Insurance companies could no longer deny people coverage based on preexisting conditions. Since then, to cover more people, 40 states plus Washington, D.C., have expanded Medicaid, the government health program for those with low incomes or disabilities.<\/p>\n Now it feels as if we\u2019re moving backward, Oberlander said. \u201cWe are now, in the past two years, in an era where the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have reversed that progress.\u201d<\/p>\n Michigan, a battleground state that President Donald Trump won in 2024, saw some of the steepest ACA plan enrollment drops<\/a> after the GOP-controlled Congress allowed enhanced tax subsidies, which helped people afford their premiums, to expire at the end of last year. Insurance companies in Michigan hiked individual marketplace rates by an average of 20%. And up to 355,000 Michiganders are expected to lose their Medicaid coverage in 2028 because of cuts included in Trump\u2019s signature law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, according to estimates from the Urban Institute<\/a>, a left-leaning think tank.<\/p>\n At El-Sayed\u2019s town hall in Lansing, Darleana Ash said patients at the medical diagnostics lab where she works are increasingly skipping tests because they can\u2019t afford them. Others drive hours from rural areas because their local labs have closed or are no longer in their insurance networks. She worries about the patients who must choose between their medications and groceries some months.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you got somebody that\u2019s 75, 80 years old, guess what? They\u2019re going to go without the medication, because they got to eat,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Packed in near the front of the crowded town hall was Cindy Lou Coolich, a boisterous retiree wearing a campaign T-shirt and cowboy hat. She spent years working for a company that helped uninsured people enroll in coverage, until she got sick herself. A bout of sepsis nearly killed her and left her disabled. Suddenly, she was the one enrolling in Medicaid and living on $900 a month from Social Security.<\/p>\n She lost the 15-acre horse farm she\u2019d owned, and then everything else, she said. \u201cExcept my car.\u201d The saving grace, oddly, was the death of her ex-husband. Because they\u2019d been married for more than 10 years, she could benefit from his Social Security benefits. \u201cSo now I\u2019m doing quite well!\u201d she laughed. But to her, it hardly seemed like the mark of a functioning healthcare system that someone had to die for things to get better.<\/p>\n A Universal Response<\/strong><\/p>\n Democrats aren\u2019t the only ones responding to voters\u2019 healthcare discontent. Republican Mike Rogers, a former Michigan congressman and El-Sayed\u2019s opponent, recently released a brief healthcare plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI just can\u2019t think of a more important issue to the people of Michigan than healthcare and costs, the rising costs,\u201d he said. At a press conference<\/a> announcing his health platform, he broadly attacked El-Sayed and Medicare for All.<\/p>\n \u201c[If] the government\u2019s going to give you something, they have to take it away from someone else,\u201d Rogers said.<\/p>\n Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) at a rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Aug. 31. (Sarah Rice\/Bloomberg via Getty Images)<\/p>\n Under Medicare for All, millions of Michiganders with private health insurance would lose that coverage, he said. Pointing to estimates that Medicare for All would cost some $4 trillion per year, he said, \u201cGuess what? People pay for that.\u201d (A recent preprint study from Yale<\/a> researchers found that the cost of implementing Medicare for All, estimated at $4.2 trillion, would save about $1 trillion in healthcare spending.) Rogers\u2019 campaign declined an interview request from KFF Health News.<\/p>\n Concerns about increased taxation, disruption to the current system, and reduced access to services can make Medicare for All a political liability in a close election, Oberlander said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if the fears that they\u2019re spreading are actually accurate,\u201d he said. \u201cPolitically, what matters is if they can scare people.\u201d<\/p>\n But even if El-Sayed wins in November, the chances of Medicare for All replacing the current system \u201cremain very remote in the short to medium term,\u201d Oberlander said.<\/p>\n Given the staunch opposition from Republicans and many moderate Democrats, not to mention the lobbying power of the healthcare industry, massively overhauling the U.S. health system won\u2019t suddenly be achievable because of a single Senate candidate.<\/p>\n Thomas \u201cJermaine\u201d Carey knows this. A self-described activist, he attended a recent El-Sayed town hall in Detroit feeling \u201ckind of sold out\u201d by what he calls the \u201cstraight-ticket\u201d Democratic Party. Medicare for All sounds good, he said. \u201cDo I believe it?\u201d He shrugged.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still America,\u201d he said. \u201cYou still have super PACs, the lobbyists that control everything.\u201d<\/p>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on KFF Health News<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LANSING, Mich. \u2014 Christina Starks-Clay doesn\u2019t know how \u201cMedicare for All\u201d would work exactly, but she\u2019s willing to bet it\u2019d be better than what she has now. Standing in line for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed\u2019s town hall in the state\u2019s capital in September, she whipped out her phone to pull up a screenshot. 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