Republican pollster Ashlee Rich Stephenson said in an interview that aired Thursday on “What America’s Thinking” that if Democrats run to the left on health care, the GOP will have a chance to come up with a counterplan.
“Democrats are now starting to talk about single-payer. The cat’s coming out of the bag. They tried to say that Republicans were going to take your health care away, preexisting conditions, things in 2018 that were effective but false,” Stephenson, chief strategy officer at WPA Intelligence, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha.
“Now with this [Democratic] presidential primary starting, I believe that we’re going to run so far to the left on health care that there’s a huge opening for Republicans to get a really good, solid plan together, which frankly, we misstepped on a little bit,” she continued.
Republicans are in the process of rebooting their health care strategy after they were unable to repeal former President Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act, in the last Congress.
Recent polling shows that Americans would like the new Congress, which started last week, to prioritize the issue of health care.
A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey showed that 49 percent of respondents said the government should tackle health care as a top priority. That was second only to economic concerns.
Meanwhile, a new Hill-HarrisX poll released Thursday found that a majority of Americans said courts should uphold a ruling by a Texas federal judge last month invalidating ObamaCare.
— Julia Manchester
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