He, like many Republicans these days, walks a perilous line when talking health care.

Ben Jacobs, a reporter for The Guardian, approached the candidate armed with an audio recorder and persistent, pesky questions about a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, which found that the GOP’s American Health Care Act would leave 23 million more Americans uninsured over 10 years and would effectively price out from coverage millions with preexisting conditions.

Though the AHCA passed muster in the House of Representatives, disapproval of the Republican plan has been high among voters — by ratios of more than 2-to-1 among men and more than 3-to-1 among women, according to a . Over 50 percent of Republicans opposed cutting federal funding for Medicaid, a component of the bill.

Torn between conflicting impulses, the GOP candidate for Montana’s only seat in the House of Representatives had already stepped into the health care muck twice — on opposite sides of the issue. He told reporters for the Obamacare repeal bill passed by the House earlier this month, but a tape surfaced of during a fundraising call with D.C. lobbyists. No wonder he wasn’t eager to respond to Jacobs’ question.

On the other side of the political divide, Democratic challenger Rob Quist tried to seize the moment, making opposition to the AHCA a campaign issue. On the final weekend before Thursday’s vote, Quist made a major buy of political ads that pinned the erosion of preexisting condition protections on his opponent. He confided his own preexisting condition — related to “a botched gall bladder surgery” — and noted that about half of all Montanans have a preexisting condition. Approximately 52 million Americans have a health history that could make them uninsurable in the future, if laws don’t guard against the practice.

According to the CBO report, “people who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.”

Quist’s health narrative also dissolved one of Gianforte’s most potent attacks on him: financial problems that led to bankruptcy. Medical bills caused that bankruptcy, Quist said, and indeed, as a folk singer for most of his life, Quist was someone who had to buy health insurance on the unstable and discriminatory individual market. At 69, he can now rely on Medicare.

Gianforte, at 56, is in the age range of those who can be charged five times more than younger people for insurance under the House-passed bill. But, like President Donald Trump, Gianforte is a wealthy businessman, who likely has not had to focus deeply on the high costs of health coverage.

The altercation may not have affected the election. The seat has been occupied by a Republican for more than two decades, and nearly two-thirds of the expected turnout had already cast a ballot by mail. Montana also has same-day voter registration. Reporters from Montana Public Radio heard from brand-new voters Thursday — some who were appalled and compelled by Gianforte’s behavior and others who thought Jacobs was in the wrong.

It’s hard to say how much health care influenced Gianforte’s 6 percentage point win over Quist. The use of public lands had been the central issue in the election, and both candidates had avoided the topic of health care for much of the race, which replaces the seat vacated by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

But Gianforte’s election eve scuffle may signal how tense and explosive health care will be politically for the 2018 election cycle.

Eric Whitney of Montana Public Radio contributed to this report.

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“One in 32, think about that,” said singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistic. “Thirty years after we first heard of AIDS, it is really a tragedy that anybody is being infected.”

But people are being infected with the virus in the U.S. and, as Keys said, black women are affected disproportionately. Keys stammered a little as she read the word “disproportionately” from her notes, and then recovered and repeated it with force saying, “It’s a big word and it’s a bad thing. That’s not acceptable.”

Keys’ comments came at the kickoff of the campaign, an effort to increase awareness of HIV and AIDS among women, a new part of the Greater Than AIDS public information push by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent part of the foundation.)

The and black women in particular are sobering.

• There are more than 1.1 million people living with HIV in the U.S., and one-in-four of them are women.
• The rate of infection for black women was 20 times higher in 2010 than it was for white women (38.1 per 100,000, compared to 1.9 per 100,000).
• In 2010, 60 percent of women with HIV were African American, 19 percent were Latino, and 18 percent were white, according to the CDC.
• Newly infected black and Latina women are more likely to be younger, with 23 percent of black women and 21 percent of Latina women in the 13-24 year old age range.
• In 2009, black women accounted for the greatest share of deaths among women with HIV at 65 percent, followed by white women at 17 percent and Latinas at 14 percent.

One of the main themes of the campaign – which includes videos, public service ads, and social media efforts — is to make the issue personal for women. A living with HIV. “They are just like you and just like me,” Keys says in the video of the women, who all sat in the front row of the foundation’s conference center during Monday’s kickoff.

Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Barack Obama, and chairwoman of the White House Council on Women & Girls, also spoke at the event, making the point that the issue of women and AIDS has long been a personal one for her.

“Every day I carry around the heartbreak of losing my sister-in-law, who died nearly 20 years ago,” Jarrett said. “She went months without being diagnosed because nobody thought to test a married woman at the time.”

Jarrett pointed out that, under the Affordable Care Act, HIV testing is now covered as a preventive service without cost sharing, and beginning in 2014, people with HIV cannot be denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition.

This article first appeared on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News and is republished here under a .