MIAMI — Florida’s 2026 governor’s race is reviving one of Republicans’ most painful public policy debates: what to do about Obamacare.
In a state where nearly 5 million people rely on marketplace coverage — more than anywhere else in the country — GOP front-runner Rep. Byron Donalds and outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis are suggesting Affordable Care Act coverage should be scaled back. Both men have argued that most people don’t need comprehensive insurance plans and should instead rely on health savings accounts or bare-bones catastrophic coverage.
The GOP’s internal war over the ACA has burned the party before — most notably in the 2018 midterms, when voters punished Republicans for threatening coverage protections. Eight years later, with Florida more dependent than ever on the law’s subsidies, Democrats like David Jolly are betting the politics haven’t changed.
“Republicans are going to ensure that more people in Florida go into next year without health care coverage,” Jolly, the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said Tuesday at a gathering by the Economic Club of Miami. “And I think we should be a state — and we need a governor — that fights for more coverage, for more Floridians.”
Jolly was responding to comments Donalds made during a recent Fox News Radio interview, in which the congressman said he wanted to “just do away with” the health care law. Donalds specifically took issue with Obamacare’s “community rating” rule, which says sick people can’t be charged more than healthy people for coverage.
“You have to get back to state-run health care insurance,” Donalds said, arguing most Americans “don’t need a full-blown, gold-plated plan.” He pushed for more prices to be public and for an expansion of health savings accounts, which allow people to put tax-free money into a debit account they can use for copays, medical products, tests or procedures.
Rallying around Obamacare’s protections for preexisting conditions proved to be a winning message for Democrats in 2018. These protections do make health insurance more expensive for healthier people who rarely seek medical care, but the federal government kicks in the cost of premiums for people who enroll in the plans to help more people afford coverage.
The debate over Obamacare’s rules has emerged yet again ahead of the 2026 midterms: A proposal to keep insurance subsidies more generous is one of the key issues at the center of the federal government shutdown. Democrats are pushing to extend the subsidies, while most Republicans are either against doing so or want to do it for only a year — or just for people below a certain income — to reduce government spending.
Should Congress fail to extend the Obamacare subsidies, Florida is expected to be among the hardest-hit states. Roughly 4.7 million Floridians are enrolled in the marketplace plans, and most are expected to see their monthly costs more than double, with middle-class people especially hard hit, according to a KFF health policy analysis. In 10 congressional districts in Florida, a fifth of residents have Obamacare plans. The insurance tends to cover people who own small businesses, are self-employed or work part time.
In Congress, members and their staff have to sign up for plans under Obamacare. But they still receive a contribution from their employer, the federal government. The contribution makes the plans less expensive but isn’t available to most Americans.
Jolly’s campaign highlighted this contrast in a fundraising email sent Tuesday, noting the insurance was “paid for by your tax dollars” and highlighting how Floridians are expected to lose health care coverage if Congress doesn’t extend the subsidies. Danielle Alvarez, senior adviser to the Donalds’ campaign, said in response to Jolly’s comments that he was “desperate to be relevant.”
“Here is the cold, hard truth: Florida Democrats don’t want him and neither do Floridians,” she said.
DeSantis made similar comments as Donalds over the weekend. During an appearance at the Hoover Institution, he argued most people younger than 50 do not need robust health care plans and could get away with a catastrophic plan.
The governor does have family experience in dealing with the health care system: First lady Casey DeSantis was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 41. She has since worked to expand funding for cancer research and has also shared her frustration about medical experts ignoring her intuition that something was wrong when she initially sought care.
The governor hasn’t said what health care coverage he uses, but top state officials in Florida have the option to receive robust coverage for family plans in exchange for about $30 a month in premiums.
Asked about Jolly’s comments, Donalds’ campaign provided a statement from him saying Jolly was “ignoring reality” and noting health insurance costs have only climbed since Obamacare passed.
“It is devastating hard working Floridians,” Donalds said. “Government mandates from Democrats are driving up the cost of insurance and as we are having this discussion, Jolly’s Democrat allies in Congress have shut down the federal government because they want to mandate healthcare for illegal immigrants on taxpayer dollars.” (Other than the Obamacare subsidies, Democrats have been pushing to reverse provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that create restrictions for coverage for certain groups of immigrants, including refugees and asylees.)
Jolly raised Donalds’ and DeSantis’ comments on Tuesday in the context of Florida becoming more unaffordable. He argued most Floridians don’t have enough in savings to pay for health care or to pay premiums at their market rate.
Jolly’s position is that Congress should extend the tax credits. He also said Florida should expand Medicaid, which is another provision under Obamacare that would be estimated to cover 800,000 low-income Floridians. Most Republicans oppose the move because they say Medicaid should be reserved for children, pregnant women, seniors and people with disabilities.
But Jolly is also vulnerable on the issue from the left. When Jolly was in Congress, he was a Republican and voted alongside his colleagues in 2015 to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Asked about his evolution, Jolly noted that when he was running for Congress, Obamacare had just been rolled out — and public sentiment about the law was low because the website to shop for health plans kept crashing. The law also caused people to lose access to their doctors despite promises to the contrary.
“I opposed the ACA at the time,” Jolly acknowledged, but he added that he soon told GOP leadership he wouldn’t vote to repeal the law anymore without a replacement plan. Then, when he left Congress, he enrolled in the Obamacare marketplace. Now, he said, he sees the government has to step in because coverage is too expensive and rural hospitals are at risk of closing. He also noted Republicans haven’t released a health care plan that would cover more people.
What informed his shift on Obamacare, he concluded, was “logic and rationality and the recognition of good public policy over ideology.”
