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Battleground Wisconsin: Voters feel nickel-and-dimed by health care costs

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Battleground Wisconsin: Voters feel nickel-and-dimed by health care costs


BIRNAMWOOD, Wis. — The land of fried cheese curds and the Green Bay Packers is among a half-dozen battleground states that could determine the outcome of the expected November rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — a contest in which the cost and availability of health care are emerging as defining issues.

At church picnics and summertime polka festivals that draw voters of all political stripes, Wisconsinites said they’re struggling to pay for even the most basic health care, from common blood tests to insulin prescriptions. A proposal by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor to expand the state’s Medicaid program to thousands of low-income residents has become a partisan lightning rod in the affordability debate: Democrats want it; Republicans don’t.

In 2020, voters here gave Biden, a Democrat, a narrow win after favoring Trump, a Republican, in 2016. Recent polling indicates that the two rivals were neck and neck in this year’s race.

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Many Wisconsin voters still can’t figure out whom to vote for — or whether to vote at all.

“I know he’s trying to improve health care and inflation, but I’m not happy with Biden,” said Bob Prelipp, 79, a Republican who lives in Birnamwood, a village of about 700 people in rural central Wisconsin. He reluctantly voted for Biden in 2020, after voting for Trump in 2016.

Prelipp was serving beer at the Birnamwood Polka Days festival on a muggy June day. Pro-Trump hats peppered the crowd, and against the backdrop of cheerful polka tunes, peppy dancing, and the sweet smell of freshly cut hay, candidates for local and state office mingled with voters.

This rural part of the state is ruby red. Trump flags fly over the landscape and businesses proudly display pro-Trump paraphernalia. Biden supporters are more visible and vocal in the Wisconsin population centers of Madison, the capital, and Milwaukee.

Biden “needs to get prices down. Everything is getting so unaffordable, even health care,” said Prelipp, a Vietnam War veteran who said his federal health care for veterans has improved markedly under Biden, including wait times for appointments. Yet he said he can’t stomach the idea of voting for him again, or for Trump, who has disparaged military veterans.

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Prelipp said people are feeling nickel-and-dimed, not only at the grocery store and gas pump, but also at doctors’ offices and hospitals.

Greg Laabs, a musician in one of the polka bands at Birnamwood, displayed a pro-Trump sticker on his tuba. He said he likes his federal Medicare health coverage but worries that if Biden is reelected Democrats will provide publicly subsidized health care to immigrants lacking legal residency.

“There are thousands of people coming across the border,” said Laabs, 71. He noted that both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed providing public health care to immigrants without legal residency as presidential candidates in 2019, a position that Harris’ home state of California has enthusiastically embraced. “We cannot support the whole world,” Laabs said.

The two main political parties will pick presidential nominees at their national conventions, and Biden and Trump are widely expected to be their choices. Republicans will gather in Milwaukee in July. Democrats will convene in Chicago in August.

Biden is trying to make health care a key issue ahead of the Nov. 5 election, arguing that he has slashed the cost of some prescription medications, lowered health insurance premiums, and helped get more Americans covered under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. He has also been a strong supporter of reproductive rights and access to abortion, particularly since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade two years ago.

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“The choice is clear: President Biden will protect our health care,” claims one of Biden’s campaign commercials.

Trump has said he wants to repeal Obamacare, despite multiple failed Republican attempts to do so over several years. “The cost of Obamacare is out of control,” Trump wrote last year. “I’m seriously looking at alternatives.”

Even Democrats who back Biden say the president must make it easier and cheaper to get medical care.

“I signed up for one of the Obamacare plans and got my cholesterol and blood sugar tested and it was like $500,” said Mary Vils, 63, a Democrat who lives in Portage County in central Wisconsin.

She strongly supports Biden but said people are feeling squeezed. “We’re fortunate because we had some savings, but that’s a lot of money out-of-pocket.”

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Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he understands “the frustration that people have.”

Evers has repeatedly attempted to expand Medicaid to low-income adults who don’t have children, which all but 10 states have done since the enactment of Obamacare in 2010. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature has repeatedly blocked his efforts, yet Evers is trying again. Expanding Medicaid would provide coverage to nearly 90,000 low-income people, according to his administration.

Evers, who supports Biden, has argued that expanding Medicaid would bring in $2 billion in federal funding that would help reimburse hospitals and insurers for uncompensated care, and ultimately “make health care more affordable.”

Many states that have expanded Medicaid have realized savings in health care spending while providing coverage to more people, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

“We have to get the Medicaid expansion money,” Evers told KFF Health News. “That would solve a lot of problems.”

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Biden’s campaign is opening field offices in Wisconsin, and he and federal health care officials make frequent visits to the state. They’re touting Biden’s record of increasing subsidies for Obamacare insurance plans, and promising to expand access to care, especially in rural communities.

“Millions more people have coverage today,” said Neera Tanden, a domestic policy adviser to Biden, at a mid-June town hall event in Rothschild, Wisconsin, to announce $11 million in new federal funding to recruit and train health care workers.

She said the gains in Obamacare coverage have helped achieve “the lowest rate of uninsurance at any time in American history. That’s not an accident.”

But attendees at the town hall event told Tanden and the secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, that they have lost access to care as hospitals and rural health clinics have closed.

“We had a hospital that’s been serving our community for over 100 years close very suddenly,” said Michael Golat, an Altoona, Wisconsin, resident who described himself as an independent voter. “It’s really a crisis here.”

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Becerra encouraged Wisconsin lawmakers to expand Medicaid. “Instantaneously, you would have hundreds of thousands of Americans in rural America, and including in rural Wisconsin, who now have access to care,” he said.

Cory Sillars, a Republican running for the Wisconsin State Assembly who campaigned at the Birnamwood polka festival, opposes Medicaid expansion and said the state should instead grant nurses the authority to practice medicine without doctor supervision, which he argued would help address gaps in rural care.

“If you’re always expanding government programs, you get people hooked on government and they don’t want to do it themselves. They expect it,” he said.

Sillars is running as a “pro-life” candidate with “traditional, Christian values,” an anti-abortion stance that some Democrats hope will backfire up and down the ballot.

Kristin Lyerly, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a Democrat, has made access to abortion and contraception central to her campaign to fill the congressional seat vacated by Mike Gallagher, a Republican who resigned in April.

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Lyerly lives outside Green Bay but practices in Minnesota after facing threats and harassment, largely from conservative extremists, she said. She was a plaintiff in the state’s legal bid to block Republicans from halting access to abortions. Abortions still are not available everywhere in Wisconsin, she said.

“It is incumbent upon me as a physician and a woman to stand up and to use my voice,” Lyerly said. “This is an issue that people in this district might not be shouting about, but they’re having conversations about it, and they’re going to vote on it.”

This article was produced by KFF Health News , which publishes California Healthline , an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation .





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Neenah-born 2026 defensive lineman Kobe Cherry earns Wisconsin offer

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Neenah-born 2026 defensive lineman Kobe Cherry earns Wisconsin offer


In the seemingly endless “Position-U” debates, Wisconsin has a good argument for Running Back University as well as Offensive Line University. But don’t think defensive players haven’t noticed who the Badgers have managed to churn out in the trenches.

“I see Wisconsin as sort of a D-line U. You’ve got JJ and TJ Watt coming out of there,” freshly offered defensive linemen Kobe Cherry told BadgerBlitz.com. “It’s an unbelievable offer I received, I’m proud of that one.”



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Notes: Pending Rule Changes Could Change Wisconsin's 2025-26 Roster

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Notes: Pending Rule Changes Could Change Wisconsin's 2025-26 Roster


Notes: Pending Rule Changes Could Change Wisconsin’s 2025-26 Roster

MADISON, Wis. – Between preparing for a rugged Big Ten conference schedule and flights across the country, Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard hasn’t put too much thought into new rules and pending legislation.

It’s on the radar though, and could change how Division-1 basketball programs operate from scheduling to roster construction.

“There’s a lot of things that are coming here,” Gard said.

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Naturally, the new rules center around Name, Image, and Likeness. The NCAA Division-1 Board of Directors is reportedly considering a rule change that would grant student-athletes five years of eligibility across all sports, a change from the current model of athletes having five years to play four. An injury waiver granted by the NCAA can add an extra eligibility year.

CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein first reported the potential change.

Athletes participating in the winter championship season and the spring season of 2020-21 were given a blanket waiver due to their year being interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In most cases, that blanket waiver ends this year.

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The proposed rule change would eliminate the need for redshirts and waivers, not to mention reshape roster construction.

The Board of Directors already made one major change in December by approving a blanket waiver granting an additional year of eligibility to all former junior college players. The waiver only applies to the 2025-26 season for athletes who competed at a non-NCAA school for at least one year and have exhausted their NCAA eligibility.

The change stems from Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia filing a lawsuit against the NCAA, arguing the eligibility rules violate antitrust law. Pavia argued that he couldn’t profit off his name, image, and likeness during his two seasons playing at the junior college level for New Mexico Military Institute.

While the blanket waiver for non-junior college players hasn’t been formally discussed, unlikely to happen before the impending approval of the House antitrust settlement in April that would start athlete revenue sharing, the news of that potential has already filtered down to players who potentially would be interested in that opportunity.

“We don’t know where this is going to go,” Gard said about the fifth year. “Is it going to get voted on? Is it going to get resolved because it impacts the computation and assembly of your future roster. We got to get answers to that. The players need to know, too.”

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Of the six seniors set to graduate on Wisconsin’s roster, guard Kamari McGee and reserve forward Markus Ilver would be eligible.

“In the era we’re in right now, where there is such a transient nature and with the objective to obviously win games, how do you win games? You have to stay old and mature,” Gard said. “In years gone by, there was a different way of doing it where you had redshirt, you could incubate and develop. All of a sudden, three years into somebody’s career, they pop up … Now we’re in a different era where staying old comes through other sources.”

One change that has already passed was the Division I Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee approving a proposal to allow teams to play up to two preseason exhibition games against any four-year school, including Division I teams.

The change is effective beginning next season and eliminates the requirement that preseason practice scrimmages be conducted in private and without official scoring, the so-called “secret scrimmages.”

Wisconsin has typically played one closed-door scrimmage and hosted one Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference school since 2011. The Badgers hosted UW-River Falls for their exhibition game and scrimmaged Northern Iowa in Platteville.

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Gard said UW- UW-Platteville will be the in-state opponent in the rotation next season and will combine with Gard’s foundation – Garding against Cancer – having events in that area of the state. Gard’s younger brother, Jeff, is in his 16th season coaching the Pioneers.

Analyzing what to do with the second exhibition game won’t be talked about until spring, according to Gard, who would still like to see more exhibition games be added.

“My stance on that is still the same that I think more would be beneficial versus practicing,” Gard said. “We’re practicing for 30 days anyway. What difference does it make if we have a closed scrimmage (or) an open scrimmage? Just the opportunity to learn more against outside competition is valuable.”

Homecoming of Sorts for Tonje

While the return of former Wisconsin guard Connor Essegian will be a sidebar to tomorrow’s home game between the Badgers (15-4, 5-3 Big Ten) and Nebraska (12-7, 2-6), but it will also be John Tonje’s first opportunity to play the Huskers.

Hailing from North Omaha, Nebraska, and going to Omaha Central High School, Tonje averaged a Nebraska Class A state-best 23.8 points along with 6.1 rebounds, 1.8 steals and 1.4 assists per game for the Eagles, leading them to a 22-6 overall record, 11-3 in conference and runner-up finish in the state tournament. He shot 50 percent from the field, 38 percent from the three-point arc, with his 73 triples leading Class A, and 82 percent at the free-throw line, also best in Class A

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In his college career, Tonje has played against Nebraska college’s Creighton, Doane College, Omaha, and Peru College but never the Huskers, who didn’t recruit him.

“I guess I got this game has a little extra excitement being the hometown kid,” Tonje said. “I wasn’t highly recruited out of high school. They weren’t one of the teams that recruited me. It is what it is. I’m happy to be here.”

Special Sneakers

For Wisconsin’s next three games, Gard and his staff will celebrate the Coaches vs. Cancer event “Suits and Sneakers” by wearing special sneakers painted by children battling cancer at the American Family Children’s Hospital (AFCH).

Visiting the hospital in January before the Iowa game, Gard and the team visited the hospital to spend time with the children and decorate the shoes, including a young patient named Emmett who decorated Gard’s shoes.

“I think that more than anything, it’s going to be really neat to see those and to wear those, knowing that they were individually designed by those kids that are going through really hard time,” Gard said. “Hopefully the visits that we made to the hospital to spend time with them and them getting a chance to see their artwork on display on national TV next week will give them a reprieve, kind of an escape that they have to deal with every day.”

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Gophers wrestling team rolls to Big Ten victory over Wisconsin

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Gophers wrestling team rolls to Big Ten victory over Wisconsin


The No. 7 Gophers wrestling team won nine of 10 matches to defeat Wisconsin 39-3 on Friday in Madison, Wis.

The victory — the Gophers’ sixth consecutive against the Badgers in Madison — featured the largest margin for the Gophers over the Badgers in Madison, surpassing the Gophers’ 40-6 victory in 2003.

The Gophers have won 12 of the past 13 meetings with the Badgers.

The match opened at 197 pounds, with the Gophers’ Isaiah Salazar winning by a technical fall. Top-ranked heavyweight Gable Steveson followed with a 21-5 technical fall to give the Gophers a 10-0 lead.

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The only Gophers with longer winning streaks than Steveson and Hartung are Dustin Schlatter, who won 65 in a row from 2005-07, and Cole Konrad, who holds the school record with 76 straight victories from 2005 to 2007.

Fourth-ranked Max McEnelly closed out the victory for the Gophers with a 22-6 technical victory at 184 pounds. McEnelly remained unbeaten in his Gophers career — 13-0 this season and 28-0 overall.

The Gophers wrestle Northwestern on Sunday in Evanston, Ill.



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