Representative Morgan Griffith has spent fourteen years telling his constituents that the Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) has failed. What he isn’t telling us is his own prominent role in Obamacare’s shortcomings.
The people in Virginia’s 9th District desperately need access to affordable health care. We have the state’s lowest median income, many chronically ill and aging residents and our hospitals are struggling financially. Hundreds of thousands of Virginians — including many in Southwest Virginia — finally got health care coverage through Medicaid expansion and subsidized insurance plans, yet our congressman has repeatedly voted to cut that coverage. Whether you love or hate Obamacare, thousands of people in our district depend on it, and after years of promising to “repeal and replace,” Republicans still haven’t offered an alternative.
In his newsletter of Sept. 19, 2025, Griffith wrote that the ACA “is failing to deliver affordable health insurance,” and pointed to the Democrats’ efforts to extend enhanced premium subsidies as proof. But he omitted a crucial fact: Many of the program’s challenges stem directly from actions taken by Griffith and his Republican colleagues to undermine the ACA.
One example is the risk corridors program. This provision was designed to compensate for insurance company losses during the ACA’s first three years of operation. Government payments would help stabilize premiums while insurers adjusted to the expense of covering people with pre-existing conditions. In 2014, Sen. Marco Rubio led the GOP in gutting this program’s funding, which left insurers $12.3 billion short of what they’d been promised.
When insurers sued to recover these payments, Griffith introduced legislation to block any settlement, calling it an “insurance company bailout.” But these payments weren’t bailouts —they were contractual obligations the government had made to encourage insurance companies to participate in the new marketplaces.
The result? Multiple insurance companies went bankrupt, while others pulled out of unprofitable rural markets or drastically raised premiums. Instead of being honest about why this was happening, Griffith pointed to the premium increases as evidence that “Obamacare was failing,” disingenuously omitting his own role in sabotaging the program.
Griffith continued his efforts to undermine his constituents’ health care by voting for the American Health Care Act, which would have eliminated protections for people with pre-existing conditions, allowing insurers to charge whatever they wanted. Fortunately, this act ultimately failed when John McCain gave it the thumbs-down. Griffith then voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which eliminated the individual mandate penalty, making it easier for healthy people to drop coverage. The loss of younger, healthier people from the risk pool increased premiums further.
Most recently, Griffith voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill that will cut $700 billion from Medicaid over 10 years. He claimed this proved Republicans were not making “massive, significant cuts.” Seven hundred billion dollars is not massive?
After voting for these cuts, Griffith visited two rural hospitals — Lee County Hospital and Clinch Valley Medical Center — which are threatened by the very legislation he’d just supported. Griffith claimed, “I don’t think they intended Lee County Hospital to close when they passed that bill.” But hospital administrators had warned that exactly that could happen, health care experts had testified about it and the Congressional Budget Office documented it. If Griffith was genuinely surprised that Lee Hospital is at risk of closing, he wasn’t paying attention.
Now, as chairman of the House Health Subcommittee, Griffith opposes extending the enhanced premium tax credits that keep coverage affordable for 22 million Americans who use ACA plans. These subsidies will expire on Dec. 31, causing increases of hundreds or thousands of dollars annually to the families who have benefited from them. Griffith frames this as fiscally responsible, but it’s really just the latest chapter in a long pattern of cutting funding, creating barriers to coverage, then blaming the ACA when people struggle to afford care.
When someone tells you that a program has failed, it would be wise to ask what they have done to ensure its success. In Morgan Griffith’s case, the answer is clear — he has done everything in his power to sabotage the ACA, despite the consequences for his constituents. The voters of Virginia’s 9th District should judge our congressman by his actions, not his rhetoric. And his actions clearly show he does not prioritize our access to affordable health care.
Janet Blanding, Robert C. Larson, Laurie Methven and Dolly Oliva are members of the Carroll County Democratic Committee‘s Facts and Common Sense Subcommittee.