This far-right conspiracy theorist thinks health care is a plot to 'enslave everybody'

On Super Tuesday, voters in North Carolina picked their gubernatorial nominees to succeed term-limited Gov. Roy Cooper: State Attorney General Josh Stein on the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson on the GOP side.

Stein's campaign has a lot of political ammunition to use against Robinson, a far-right Holocaust denier and Christian nationalist who is stridently anti-gay, has called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a "communist," and believes that women should not have been given the right to vote in the United States.

Likely 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has endorsed him, and Democratic strategists are hoping that having someone as extreme as Robinson on North Carolina's ballot will benefit President Joe Biden in the swing state.

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In an article published on March 11, the Daily Beast's Dan Merica stresses that the Stein campaign has another issue to use against Robinson: health care.

Democrats have been slamming Trump for promising to overturn the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, if he returns to the White House in January 2025. But Merica points out that Robinson is even to the right of Trump on the ACA, which he considers a plot to "enslave everybody."

"Democrats are eager to focus the race on health care in the southern state, hoping to use Robinson's opposition to the Affordable Care Act and his more recent antipathy to the state expanding Medicaid as a focal point of attacks against the Republican, employing a similar strategy that worked for the party in 2018," Merica explains. "Robinson's particular complaint about the health-care law, signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, was against one of the most popular provisions: the ability for children to stay on their parents' health-care plans until they turned 26 years old."

Trump had high hopes for abolishing Obamacare when the America Health Care Act passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017, but the bill failed in the U.S. Senate. And in the 2018 midterms, health care was a strong issue for Democrats — who didn't retake the U.S. Senate that year but recaptured the U.S. House of Representatives in a big way.

"Robinson, with his history of bombastic comments, has even argued for a more conservative position on health care than Trump, who made repealing Obamacare a focal point of his successful 2016 campaign and attempted to do just that when he took office in 2017," Merica recalls. "Trump, in a bid to assuage critics who worried that taking away health care with no replacement would be politically detrimental to Republicans, often said he would replace the Affordable Care Act 'with reforms that expand choice, freedom, affordability'…. He ultimately got on board with a Republican alternative that was projected to kick 23 million people off health insurance, significantly raise prices for people with pre-existing conditions, and send health insurance markets — according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — into an 'unsustainable spiral.'"

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Merica adds, "Robinson, however, advocated for full repeal of the Affordable Care Act with no replacement — an even bleaker alternative."

Merica points out that Stein's campaign is already attacking Robinson on Obamacare.

Elisabeth Greenleaf, campaigns director for Progress North Carolina and a Robinson critic, told the Daily Beast, "I can only imagine he will continue to double down on this stance. And our work is educating voters on the impacts of that. It's going to be a big issue in this race."

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Read The Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).