- Virginia Republican Rep. Jennifer Kiggans is positioning herself as a bipartisan defender of health care access, but she said during her campaign for Congress in 2022 that she’d “like to eliminate Obamacare” and as recently as September that she wants to eliminate a popular tax credit that subsidizes health insurance premiums after 2026.
- During her 2022 campaign, Kiggans called for repeal of the 2009 Affordable Care Act law, commonly known as Obamacare, which expanded Medicaid coverage to 500,000 Virginians, barred insurers from discriminating against more than 3 million Virginians with preexisting medical conditions, and allows an estimated 411,000 people in the commonwealth to purchase affordable health insurance through the marketplace.
- In an audio recording of a candidate forum that took place in 2022, the existence of which was reported by the New York Times on Nov. 25, then-state Sen. Kiggans said she supported complete repeal of the ACA, falsely claiming that it had slashed funding of the Medicare program: “There’s a couple of areas where I would like to see federal spending cut. Number one, I’d like to eliminate Obamacare. Obamacare, when it was enacted, took money away from Medicare. It took $716 billion away from Medicare, which provides care for our greatest generation, for my patient population. Our older adults live on a fixed income. They can’t afford medical care, dental care, again, hospital … stays, medications. So, I would like to eliminate Obamacare and put that money back, reinvest it back into Medicare.”
- Unless Congress acts to extend it, an expansion of the existing advance premium tax credit, which subsidizes the cost of insurance premiums purchased through the ACA marketplace, will expire at the end of December […] If the enhanced credit is allowed to expire, hundreds of thousands of Virginians will see average increases of more than 20% in their monthly health insurance premiums.
- However, Kiggans said in September that the credit, which has benefited tens of thousands of her constituents, should be eliminated after 2026. According to a Sept. 15 Politico report, she told the outlet, “It’s time to end these tax credits, but when it comes to health care, it’s not quite as easy as letting them expire, especially when it’s something at the end of the calendar year.”
- A Kiggans spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
- While Kiggans promotes herself as having been called “one of the most bipartisan Members of the U.S. House of Representatives,” she has voted with Trump 100% of the time on key issues, according to a September analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. She voted for Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other health programs. She cast that vote after signing a letter promising to oppose a final bill that “includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.”
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