Troy Jackson Is on a Medicare for All Mission

PORTLAND, MAINE – The state of play is dire for Mainers trying to survive America’s failing health care system.

On October 1, nearly 1,000 people lost full coverage under MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program. No health insurance means relying on emergency room services and increases the amount of uncompensated care that hospitals provide, which can be a slow-motion financial catastrophe or a fast track to closure.

If access wasn’t enough of a stressor, nearly half of Maine households carry medical debt, according to Consumers for Affordable Health Care, a Maine advocacy group. This financial pressure has compromised families’ ability to pay for basic goods.

And the worst is yet to come. More than $1 trillion in cuts, the largest rollback of health programs in history, are scheduled to go into effect after the midterms. A $2.7 billion cut in MaineCare, courtesy of H.R. 1, President Trump’s 2025 mega-bill, means that about 30,000 Mainers will no longer have health care coverage. Sen. Susan Collins (R) has deflected attacks over these cuts by saying that she personally secured $50 billion for a Rural Health Transformation Program to shore up rural hospitals. But at least in Maine, most of the current year’s funding from that program goes to telehealth services outside the state, or to billing and other bureaucratic functions.

Those residents who remain eligible for Medicaid will be subject to work requirements and must reapply for benefits every six months. A bill that the Maine legislature passed last year will allow more people to access no-cost care but may well scramble hospitals’ budgets and lead to more service cuts.

All of this carnage, Troy Jackson, Collins’s Democratic challenger, would tell you, shows that the system is “crashing”—in real time.

After filling out his absentee ballot in front of the news media at a recent downtown Portland event, Jackson spoke with the Prospect and commented on how he planned to champion health care reforms that take financial pressures off Americans.

“We pick off Republicans by saying that we take the burden off of employers that are paying obscene rates for health care for their employees. You know how much better that can make our economy, make their businesses,” Jackson told the Prospect. And he added that the issue could consolidate a new Democratic caucus, too.

“What’s really exciting also about this race is that there’s a whole bunch of people running right now that believe the same thing, like Josh Turek, Peggy Flanagan, Mary Peltola, and [James] Talarico,” he said. “If we get seven or eight new senators that all believe in this, I think we’ll have a bloc that can push it.”

Of course, the politics cannot be separated from the special interests, like the health insurance industry and Big Pharma. “I’m not afraid of those people,” Jackson insisted.

The solution he gives a regular shout-out for is Medicare for All, the single-payer solution. Jackson supports the Medicare for All Act, which would establish a national health care system overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. “Just putting it on the line is the best thing to do for America, financially, health-wise,” Jackson said. “I know it’s a big lift.”

Franklin Roosevelt and his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, tried and failed to establish a national health insurance program during the Great Depression. Since then, a universal system has never managed to find a permanent political footing in Congress.

Jimmy Williams, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, told me at another Jackson event in Westbrook, a Portland suburb, that the cost of health care has already started to go up because health care providers are preparing for that time when they won’t get paid through Medicaid or Medicare.

His members “are paying over $20 an hour for health care in our union, and they go, ‘We haven’t had a raise in our pocket for the last 15 years.’” He said they increasingly want to see a single-payer-type solution or subsidy that will rein in costs “once and for all.”

“Both sides have played nothing but politics for our health care system,” Williams said, “and Troy’s right in saying that where the American public is right now is wanting to see a better solution for health care. If that’s Medicare for All, let’s do it.”

How Collins’s procedural votes contributed to the passage of one of the most destructive attacks on American social welfare programs in history has been a major talking point of the Maine Senate campaign. She ultimately voted against the mega-bill after voting earlier to advance it through a procedural motion. That was a moment when she could have stopped the Senate from moving forward with the plan, long before the legislation came up for a final vote on the floor.

KFF polls on the subject since 2006 have indicated that American adults favor having the federal government do more on health care coverage. In September, a poll found that 66 percent of American adults supported a national health care plan.

Meanwhile, medical facilities continue to shut down across Maine. Twelve birthing centers have closed over the past decade. The latest, MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital in the midcoast town of Damariscotta, is scheduled to shut down in December. Jackson, who recently celebrated the arrival, two weeks early, of his first granddaughter, has remarked that the birth could have been very different for his son and his partner had they been in far northern Aroostook County, where Jackson raised his own family. The closest birthing center is about 90 minutes away.

I spent some time recently on a sunny, clear blue-sky afternoon with Ashlynn Ward of Bangor and Kelli Brennan of Saco, two registered nurses who are members of Maine State Nurses Association/National Nurses United. They were canvassing for Jackson in Portland’s West End neighborhood, where many grand Victorian homes have been divided into apartments.

Ward, a labor and delivery nurse, said that birthing center closures hurt not only patients and health care professionals. They also harm smaller communities that won’t be able to grow because they can’t attract younger residents. Ward noted that voters tend to agree that Collins is “good for Maine; bad for the country.” But organizers and canvassers, she said, need to make the case that the election is not just about Maine.

“We need to take care of our brothers and sisters in Georgia, because her voting for [Brett] Kavanaugh and overturning Roe, that impacts people in other states,” Ward said. “The vote that she was responsible for that torched the whole country, Troy was the one that had to fix that in the state of Maine for us … If she’s chair of Appropriations and she has so much control, then why are we in this situation?”