The Health Care Voters
Kevin Johnson, the president of a precision tool–manufacturing shop in Mentor, Ohio, pins a new bar graph to the bulletin board across from his desk each month. It shows the cost-to-income ratio at his company, Fischer Special Tooling, and it’s not a pretty picture. Expenses are rising while revenues decline; the image slopes painfully to the right. Johnson, who’s tall and lean and has an engineer’s no-nonsense manner, rattles off a list of challenges facing the small business that has been in his family since the early 1980s, from a poorly trained labor pool to low-cost foreign competitors. But what’s most on his mind these days is health care. “It was killing us,” he says.
Johnson slides another graph across his tidy wooden desk. This one shows how much Fischer Special Tooling has spent each year on health care for its 13 employees. For years, the figure climbed by an average of 8.5% annually, peaking at $96,000 in 2016. But since then, costs have steadily declined. This year, the company spent $60,000 on health care: a 25% decrease from two years ago. One big reason, Johnson says, is the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.
He’s not alone. Thanks to various ACA provisions, the overall rise in health care costs has slowed. “I’m not saying the ACA is perfect,” says Johnson, 55, who identifies as neither Democrat nor Republican and says he has often voted for candidates of both parties. “I’m saying, let’s keep the parts that work and fix the parts that don’t.”
Finding political leaders with a plan to do that is a high priority for tens of millions of Americans this election season. In poll after poll, voters say access to affordable care
