Forget ‘Repeal and Replace.’ The One Issue Unifying Americans Is Affordable Health Care

Kevin Johnson, the president of a precision tool–manufacturing shop in Mentor, Ohio, … [says] a poorly trained labor pool to low-cost foreign competitors. But what’s most on his mind these days is health care. “It was killing us,” he says.

This year, the company spent $60,000 on health care: a 25% decrease from two years ago. One big reason, Johnson says, is the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.

I’m not saying the ACA is perfect,” says Johnson, 55, who identifies as neither Democrat nor Republican and says he has often voted for candidates of both parties. “I’m saying, let’s keep the parts that work and fix the parts that don’t.”

Finding political leaders with a plan to do that is a high priority for tens of millions of Americans this election season. In poll after poll, voters say access to affordable care is their top concern.

For good reason. While the parts of the ACA that work may have helped keep Fischer Special Tooling in business, the parts that don’t are crushing American families. Since 2008, the average family’s health-insurance premium has increased 55%, twice as fast as wages, and deductibles have tripled. While the ACA has succeeded in extending health care coverage to 20 million people through Medicaid expansions and federal subsidies, it has done very little to keep costs down for many others. “It’s fair to say it has failed middle-income Americans,” says Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

For years, Republicans seemed happy to let Obamacare fail–and even to accelerate the process. The Trump Administration has systematically weakened the ACA, cutting back its patient protections, undermining insurance markets and boosting state decision making at the expense of federal rules.

More From TIME Magazine: