As the Republican Party begins to define itself for the 2024 presidential campaign, its philosophy on health care is coming into focus: The government is not here to help you. But it should be allowed to get in your way.
Wednesday night’s debate, which featured eight of the leading not-Donald-Trump candidates for the Republican nomination, spent little time on health care except for an extended exchange on abortion, covered in depth by Vox’s Rachel Cohen.
But if you piece together the abortion debate with other moments in which health care briefly took the spotlight, the party’s position on federal power in the medical sphere begins to take shape. On abortion, on health care for transgender people, even on mental health care, the candidates were comfortable flexing governmental authority to dictate the terms of medical treatment.
But when it comes to using that same authority to protect people during a global pandemic or providing health coverage to people with low incomes, they don’t want the government getting involved.
How the GOP candidates want to use state power to restrict health care
Abortion — which Fox moderator Martha MacCallum cast as a “losing” political issue for Republicans ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — led to a contentious exchange in which former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley urged her fellow candidates to be square with GOP voters: It will be difficult to pass a national abortion ban given the political realities of the US Senate.
Haley was largely an outlier, though North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum also argued the issue would be rightfully left to the states under the 10th Amendment. Former Vice President Mike Pence and US Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina made impassioned pleas for a 15-week national abortion ban. Scott argued that the decision on abortion policy should be taken away from the states — the elected representatives who are closest to the pregnant people affected and who conservatives…
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