Angela Proxmire doesn’t know which
is worse: keeping the health-care law President
Barack Obama
passed, which has cost her family money and peace of mind, or
the prospect that
Mitt Romney will be elected and scrap the
measure outright.
The 45-year-old mother of three has had to switch her
family’s doctors and health plans to avoid premium increases her
insurer blamed on the 2010 law, and stop sending her asthmatic
13-year-old son to biannual sessions with a specialist. Yet when
she looks toward the November elections, conflicted over whether
to support Obama as she did in 2008 or cast her vote for
Republican rival Romney, she’s worried about the alternative.
Shoppers at a Costco Wholesale Corp. store in Chicago. Photographer: Tim Boyle/Bloomberg
“I feel a little bit like Obama hasn’t come through with
his promises on health care because it’s a huge chunk of our
income, and costs have been going up,” Proxmire said as she
shopped for plastic storage bins and housewares at a Wal-Mart
store in Sterling,
Virginia. “I can’t say I know exactly what
Romney will do, but I know he wants to get rid of it, and that
scares me too, thinking that it could be even more expensive and
then we’re really on our own to figure out how to find
coverage.”
Proxmire is part of a group of mostly low- to middle-income
mothers living in suburbs and exurbs who are viewed by both the
Obama and Romney campaigns as potentially crucial swing voters,
and are conflicted over the issue of
health care.
Defining Wal-Mart Moms
Dubbed Wal-Mart moms, these voters are defined by polling
experts who have studied them as women with children 18 years of
age or younger living at home and who shop at the superstore at
least once a month. They supported Obama in 2008 and then
switched to back Republicans in the 2010 congressional election.
They comprise 27 percent of all registered women voters, making
them about 14 percent of the electorate, according to the
research.
Their fluid voting patterns put them up for grabs in the
2012 presidential contest. They are a key area of focus for
Romney’s campaign, which employs Neil Newhouse, who has
researched them extensively, as its pollster.
“Health care decisions are really part of the daily
struggle that these moms go through,” said Margie Omero, a
Democratic polling expert at the Washington-based firm Momentum
Analysis who partnered with Newhouse to research the group.
“They’re the ones that have to make doctor’s appointments and
do the follow-ups and fill the prescriptions. A lot of these
moms aren’t quite sure how the health-care reform bill is going
to affect them, so there are some opportunities for candidates
in both parties to really talk about that.”
Supreme Court Ruling
The discussion is likely to heat up this month, with the
Supreme Court to rule as soon as June 25 on a legal challenge to
the health-care law and Democrat Obama ramping up his defense of
the measure that Romney promises to repeal and replace it. The
measure was designed to expand insurance to at least 30 million
people -- in part through mandating that every adult American
obtain coverage -- and control soaring costs in an industry that
accounts for 18 percent of the
U.S. economy.
While the economy is by far the top issue on voters’ minds,
women are much more likely than men to name medical care as an
important topic, said Liz Hamel, director of public opinion and
survey research at the
Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks
views of the health-care law.
Gender Gap
A May 8-14 survey by Kaiser showed that while 50 percent of
men have an unfavorable opinion of the measure, compared with 31
percent who view it favorably, women are nearly split and more
likely to favor it, with 42 percent viewing it positively
compared to 39 percent who see it negatively.
“There’s probably a bigger group of women who are in play
with their attitudes on it,” Hamel said.
That’s true at the Sterling Wal-Mart, located in
politically competitive Loudoun County, Virginia, which
supported Obama in 2008 and one year later joined the state’s
other voters in backing Republican
Bob McDonnell for governor.
An exurb situated 29 miles outside of
Washington near the
Dulles Technology Corridor, the county is Virginia’s fastest
growing, adding 142,000 residents between 2000 and 2010,
according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The growth was largely
spurred by an influx of minorities; the Hispanic population in
the county tripled during that decade while the Asian population
rose from 9,000 to 46,000.
‘On the Fence’
As Sarah Petrus and her 12-year-old daughter strolled the
toy aisle at the Wal-Mart, the woman said she’s “on the fence
about” the law. A nursing student who backed Obama’s Republican
opponent
Arizona Senator
John McCain in 2008, Petrus said while
the president’s health-care proposal had some good aspects, it
hasn’t worked out as planned.
“I am interested in Romney because I am really hoping he
can improve it so that health-care costs actually go down, but
it always concerns me when a new president comes along -- it’s
so much uncertainty,” Petrus said. “Maybe Obama should get
more time and some of the benefits will start panning out.”
If there’s one constant in how Wal-Mart moms view the
health-care law, say pollsters, it’s that they want specific,
quantifiable information about what they and their families have
to gain or lose from it.
“They’re open to hearing from both sides on health care,
and they want to feel that how they vote is a positive for their
families,” said Alex Bratty, a Republican pollster who works
with Newhouse at Alexandria, Virginia-based Public Opinion
Strategies and has also partnered with Omero to track Wal-Mart
moms. “There’s this hunger for real reassurance: ‘Show me the
specifics, show me the plan, show me how it’s going to work.’”
Romney Challenge
The challenge is especially acute for Romney, Bratty said,
since these women -- who like most swing voters tend not to pay
much attention to the political debate until just before the
election -- don’t know much about the presumptive Republican
presidential nominee or his health-care plans.
Romney has been working in recent days to fill in some of
those blanks, delivering a June 13 speech in
Orlando,
Florida,
in which he said he would give states and insurance companies
the responsibility for covering the uninsured and provide tax
breaks to help people afford medical coverage. He would scrap
the mandate to purchase insurance that is central to Obama’s
measure and the prohibition barring
insurance companies from
denying coverage to everyone with a pre-existing health
condition; only those who already had insurance would enjoy that
protection.
Obama’s Pitch
Obama and his allies are targeting women voters with
material touting popular provisions of the law that are already
in place, such as the guarantee of coverage for those suffering
from pre-existing conditions and allowing children to remain on
their parents’ health plans until age 26. The
Democratic
National Committee sent out mailers in March that listed ways
the law would help them, including “preventing discrimination
against women like you.”
“It’s a propaganda war in essence, and it really is going
to depend on which side is able to define for women a more
compelling story about what is good or bad for them about this
legislation,” said Susan J. Carroll of the Center for American
Women and Politics at
Rutgers University in
New Brunswick,
New
Jersey. “It’s more a battle of perception that anything else.”
During a June 6 Wal-Mart Moms focus group in Virginia, a
woman identified as Stephanie J. named health care as a top
issue and said she was struggling in the current system. Costs
are so high, she said, that the insurance plan she can afford
won’t cover testing for both herself and her son for celiac
disease, a gluten intolerance from which her daughter suffers
that is thought to be hereditary.
Demanding Specifics
Stephanie said she wanted more specifics from Romney about
how he would manage costs. “Show me an affordable but good
health care,” she said. “How are you going to do that?”
Wal-Mart moms also are preoccupied with the sluggish
economy, as they are often the ones in their households who most
directly deal with the real-world consequences of joblessness
and underemployment: paying bills, shopping for groceries and
gas, and maintaining ever-tighter budgets.
“We’re OK, but we live on a budget, and it gets harder all
the time,” said Proxmire, the mother of three.
Some have fared even worse. A mother of two identified as
Sarah S. at the Wal-Mart focus group said the weak housing
market has left her husband, a contractor, with little work and
upended their housing and family plans.
“We lost our home and we’ve had to downsize,” she said.
“We wanted more kids and we haven’t had them, because we’re
afraid we can’t afford them.”
