Health care, an issue fraught with political peril in Virginia and around the country, is shaping up to be a defining issue in the 2012 U.S. Senate race in the Old Dominion. Former Virginia Gov. George Allen is blasting President Obama’s federal health care overhaul, which Democrat Tim Kaine spent the past year defending as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Allen called the Obama plan a “massive, expensive experiment” that must be replaced.
But Allen, in turn, is taking heat from a Republican primary opponent, Tea Party leader Jamie Radtke, who is chastising the former senator for his 2003 vote for a nearly $1 trillion prescription drug program for senior citizens.
“Just as George Allen’s vote for the trillion-dollar Medicare expansion was fiscally irresponsible, the Democrats’ imposition of Obamacare is equally reckless,” she said.
Virginia is already in the middle of the health care debate. The state is suing the federal government in hopes of having the health care reforms struck down as unconstitutional.
Allen supported the program proposed by former President George W. Bush because he believed it would foster competition and patient choice that would keep costs down, said spokeswoman Katie Wright.
Kaine supported Obama’s reforms because an increasing number of small businesses could not afford health insurance for their employees, and more than one million Virginians were uninsured, said spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine.
“The health care law is going to be a key issue for mobilizing Republicans at the grass roots, no doubt,” said Mark Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University. “The intensity of the issue is on the side of the Republicans.”
If the race comes down to Allen and Kaine in the fall of 2012, health care could be a defining issue, Rozell said.
“The contrast will stand very strongly among grass-roots conservatives,” he said.
