Mary Catherine Johnson is a retired small-business owner from outside Rochester, New York. She voted for Donald Trump three times.

Lexy Mealing, who used to work in a physician’s office, is from Long Island. She’s a Democrat.

But the women share a common bond. They both survived breast cancer.

And when the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network organized its annual citizen lobby day in Washington last month, Johnson and Mealing were among the more than 500 volunteers pushing Congress to keep cancer research and support for cancer patients at the top of the nation’s health care agenda.

The day is something of a ritual for groups like the cancer organization.

This year, it came as Democrats and Republicans in Washington slid toward a budget impasse that shut down the federal government. But these volunteers transcended their political differences and found common ground.

“Not one person here discussed if you’re a Democrat, if you’re a Republican,” said Mealing, one of 27 volunteers in the New York delegation. “Cancer doesn’t care.”

Every one of the volunteer lobbyists had been touched in some way by the deadly disease, which is expected to kill people in the U.S. this year.

Johnson said each of her mother’s 10 siblings died from cancer, as did a lifelong friend who died at age 57, leaving behind his wife and two young daughters.

Like many of the New York volunteers, Johnson also said she’s worried about the state of politics today.

“I think we’re probably the most divided that we’ve ever been,” she said. “That scares me. Scares me for my grandchildren.”

Katie Martin, a cancer volunteer from outside Buffalo, also worries. She and her daughter recently drove past political protesters screaming at one another on the street.

 “My daughter is silent and then starts asking, ‘What is this?’ And I don’t know how to explain it, because it doesn’t even make sense to me,” she said. “It’s very heartbreaking.”

Mealing said she can barely watch the news these days. “A lot of Americans are very stressed out. There’s a lot of things going on.”

Americans are indeed split over many issues — immigration, guns, President Trump. But helping people with cancer and other serious illnesses retains broad bipartisan support, polls show.

In , 7 in 10 voters said it’s very important for the federal government to fund medical research. That included majorities of Democrats and Republicans.

“It’s rare in today’s environment to see numbers like that,” said Jarrett Lewis, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey for patient groups. “But almost everybody in this country knows somebody who’s had cancer.”

Similarly, a recent found that three-quarters of U.S. adults, including most Republicans who align with the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, want Congress to extend subsidies that help Americans buy health insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.

These subsidies, which are critical to people with chronic illnesses such as cancer, are among the main sticking points in the current budget impasse in Congress.

As the cancer volunteers gathered in a conference hotel in Washington, they focused on their shared agenda: increasing funding for cancer research, retaining insurance subsidies, and expanding access to cancer screening.

“We may not see eye to eye politically. We might not even see eye to eye in social circumstances,” said Martin, the Buffalo-area volunteer. “But we can see beyond those differences because we’re here for one cause.”

The state delegations practiced the pitches they would make to their members of Congress. They ran through the personal stories they would share. And they swapped tips for how to deal with resistant staff and how to ask for a photo with a lawmaker.

On the morning of their lobby day, they reconvened in a cavernous ballroom, decked out in matching blue polo shirts and armed with red information folders to leave at each office they would visit.

They got a pep talk from a pair of college basketball coaches. Then they headed across town to Capitol Hill.

The army of volunteers — from every state in the country — hit 484 of the 535 Senate and House offices.

Not every visit was an unqualified victory. Many Republican lawmakers object to extending the insurance subsidies, arguing they’re too costly.

But lawmakers from both parties have backed increased research funding and support for more cancer screening.

And the New Yorkers felt good about the day. “It was amazing,” Mealing said as the day wrapped up. “You could just feel the sense of, ‘Everybody stronger together.’”

When evening came, the volunteers met on the National Mall for a candlelight vigil. It was raining. Bagpipes played.

Around a pond near the Lincoln Memorial, some 10,000 tea lights glimmered in little paper bags. Each luminary had a name on it — a life touched by cancer.

John Manna, another New Yorker, is a self-described Reagan Republican whose father died from lung cancer. He reflected on the lessons this day could offer a divided nation.

“Talk to people,” he said. “Get to know each other as people, and then you can understand somebody’s positions.  We have little disagreements, but, you know, we don’t attack each other. We talk and discuss it.”

Manna said he would be back next year.

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Cox, who is a property manager at a real estate company in Globe, has tenants who rely on the safety-net program. And at the domestic violence shelter where she volunteers as president of the board, Cox said, staff always look to enroll women and their children if they can.

But Cox, who is 65, has mixed feelings about Medicaid. “It’s not that I don’t see the need for it. I see the need for it literally on a weekly basis,” she said. “I also see a need for revamping it significantly because it’s been taken advantage of for so long.”

It wasn’t hard to find people in Globe like Cox with complicated views about Medicaid.

Gila County, where Globe is located, is a conservative place — almost 70% of voters went for President Donald Trump in November. And concerns about government waste run deep.

Like many rural communities, it’s also a place where people have come to value government health insurance. The number of Gila County residents on Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program has nearly doubled over the past 15 years, according to data from the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. Today, almost 4 in 10 residents are on one of the plans for low- and moderate-income people or those with disabilities.

So as congressional Republicans consider plans to from Medicaid, the debate over the program hits close to home for many Globe residents, even as some welcome the prospect of tighter rules and less government spending.

For Heather Heisler, the stakes are high. Her husband has been on Medicaid for years.

“We’re ranchers, and there’s not much money in ranching,” said Heisler, who gets her own health care from the Indian Health Service. “Most people think there is, but there isn’t.”

Heisler was selling handicrafts outside the old county jail in Globe on a recent Friday night when the town hosted a downtown street fair with food trucks and live music.

She said Medicaid was especially helpful after her husband had an accident on the ranch. A forklift tipped over, and he had to have part of his left foot amputated. “If anything happens, he’s able to go to the doctor,” she said. “Go to the emergency room, get medicines.”

She shook her head when asked what would happen if he lost the coverage. “It would be very bad for him,” she said.

Among other things, proposed tax legislation written by House Republicans would require working-age Medicaid enrollees to prove they are employed or seeking work. The bill, which passed the House and has advanced to the Senate, would also mandate more paperwork from people to prove they’re eligible.

Difficult applications can dissuade many people from enrolling in Medicaid, even if they’re eligible, . And the nonpartisan more than 10 million people will likely lose Medicaid and CHIP insurance under the House Republican plan.

That would reverse big gains made possible by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which has allowed millions of low-income, working-age adults in places like Globe to get health insurance.

Nationally, Medicaid and CHIP have expanded dramatically over the past two decades, with enrollment in the programs surging from about in 2005 to more than last year, according to federal data.

“Medicaid has always played an important role,” said Joan Alker, who runs the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. “But its role has only grown over the last couple of decades. It really stepped in to address many of the shortcomings in our health care system.”

That’s particularly true in rural areas, where the share of is higher, residents have lower incomes, and communities are reliant on industries with skimpier health benefits such as agriculture and retail.

In Globe, former mayor Fernando Shipley said he’s seen this firsthand.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, those are the people that aren’t working.’ Not necessarily,” said Shipley, who operates a State Farm office across the road from the rusted remains of the Old Dominion copper mine. “If you’re a single parent with two kids and you’re making $20 an hour,” he added, “you’re not making ends meet. You’ve got to pay rent; you’ve got to feed those kids.”

Not far away, at the local hospital, some low-wage workers at the registration desk and in housekeeping get health care through Medicaid, chief financial officer Harold Dupper said. “As much as you’d like to pay everyone $75,000 or $80,000 a year, the hospital couldn’t stay in business if that was the payroll,” he said, noting the financial challenges faced by rural hospitals.

The growing importance of Medicaid in places like Globe helps explain why Republican efforts to cut the program face so much resistance, even among conservatives.

“There’s been a shift in the public’s attitude, and particularly voters on the right, that sometimes government plays a role in getting people health care. And that’s OK,” said pollster Bob Ward. “And if you take away that health care, people are going to be angry.” Ward’s Washington, D.C., firm, Fabrizio Ward, works for Trump. He also polls for a coalition trying to protect Medicaid.

At the same time, many of the communities where Medicaid has become more vital in recent years remain very conservative politically.

More than two-thirds of nearly 300 U.S. counties with the biggest growth in Medicaid and CHIP since 2008 backed Trump in the last election, according to a Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News analysis of voting results and enrollment data from Georgetown. Many of these counties are in deep-red states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Montana.

Voters in places like these are more likely to be concerned about government waste, polls show. In one recent , 75% of Republicans said they think waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid is a major problem.

The actual scale of that waste is hotly debated, though relatively few enrollees are abusing the program.

Nevertheless, around Globe, Republican arguments that cuts will streamline Medicaid seemed to resonate.

Retiree Rick Uhl was stacking chairs and helping clean up after lunch at the senior center. “There’s a lot of waste, of money not being accounted for,” Uhl said. “I think that’s a shame.” Uhl said he’s been saddened by the political rancor, but he said he’s encouraged by the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to cut government spending.

Back at the street fair downtown, David Sander, who is also retired, said he doubted Medicaid would really be trimmed at all.

“I’ve heard that they really aren’t cutting it,” Sander said. “That’s my understanding.”

Sander and his wife, Linda, were tending a stall selling embroidery that Linda makes. They also have a neighbor on Medicaid.

“She wouldn’t be able to live without it,” Linda Sander said. “Couldn’t afford to have an apartment, make her bills and survive.”

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But Rouse is looking to the federal government for relief from one particular pain point: high health care costs. “The prices are just ridiculous,” said Rouse, 53, a retired Michigan firefighter and paramedic who has voted for Trump three times. “I’d like to see a lower cap on what I have to pay out-of-pocket.”

Government regulation of health care prices used to be heresy for most Republicans. GOP leaders fiercely opposed the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which included government limits on patients’ costs. More recently, the party fought legislation signed by former President Joe Biden to cap prescription drug prices.

But as Trump begins his second term, many of the voters who sent him back to the White House welcome more robust government action to rein in a health care system many Americans perceive as out of control, polls show.

“That idea that government should just keep its hands off, even when things are tough for people, has kind of lost its sheen,” said Andrew Seligsohn, president of Public Agenda, a nonprofit that has studied about government and health care.

“We’re wandering around the country with a set of old, outdated frameworks about what ordinary Democrats and ordinary Republicans like,” he said.

Republican voters strongly back federal limits on the prices charged by drug companies and hospitals, caps on patients’ medical bills, and restrictions on how health care providers can pursue people over medical debt.

Even Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program that Republican congressional leaders are eyeing to dramatically cut, is by many GOP voters, like Ashley Williamson.

Williamson, 37, a mother of five in eastern Tennessee who voted for Trump, said Medicaid provided critical assistance when her mother-in-law needed nursing home care. “We could not take care of her,” Williamson said. “It stepped in. It made sure she was taken care of.”

Williamson, whose own family gets coverage through her husband’s employer, said she would be very concerned by large cuts in Medicaid funding that could jeopardize coverage for needy Americans.

For years, Republican ideas about health care reflected a broad skepticism about government and fears that government would threaten patients’ access to physicians or lifesaving medicines.

“The discussions 10 to 15 years ago were all around choice,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster who has worked for numerous GOP politicians, including former Maryland governor Larry Hogan. “Free market, not having the government limit or take over your health care.”

Matthews and fellow pollster Mike Perry recently convened and paid for several focus groups with Trump voters, including Rouse and Williamson, which Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News observed.

Skepticism about government lingers among rank-and-file Republicans. And ideas such as shifting all Americans into a single government health plan, akin to “Medicare for All,” are still nonstarters for many GOP voters.

But as tens of millions of Americans are driven into debt by medical bills they don’t understand or can’t afford, many are reassessing their inclination to look to free markets rather than the government, said Bob Ward, whose firm, Fabrizio Ward, polled for Trump’s 2024 campaign.

“I think most people look at this and say the market is broken, and that’s why they’re willing for someone, anyone, to step in,” he said. “The deck is stacked against folks.”

In a , Fabrizio Ward and Hart Research, which for decades has polled for Democratic candidates, found that Trump voters were more likely to blame health insurers, drug companies, and hospital systems than the government for high health care costs.

Sarah Bognaski, 31, an administrative assistant in upstate New York, is among the many Trump voters who say they resent profiteering by the health care industry. “I don’t think there is any reason a lot of the costs should be as high as they are,” Bognaski said. “I think it’s just out of pure greed.”

High health care costs have had a direct impact on Bognaski, who was diagnosed four years ago with Type 1 diabetes, a condition that makes her dependent on insulin. She said she’s ready to have the government step in and cap what patients pay for pharmaceuticals. “I’d like to see more regulation,” she said.

Charles Milliken, a retired auto mechanic in West Virginia, who said he backed Trump because the country “needs a businessman, not a politician,” expects the new president to go even further.

“I think he’s going to put a cap on what insurance companies can charge, what doctors can charge, what hospitals can charge,” said Milliken, 51, who recently had a heart attack that left him with more than $6,000 in medical debt.

Three-quarters of Trump voters back government limits on what hospitals can charge, Ward’s polling found.

And about half of Trump voters in a said the new administration should prioritize expanding the number of drugs whose price is set through negotiation between the federal Medicare program and drug companies, a program started under the Biden administration.

Perry, who’s convened dozens of focus groups with voters about health care in recent years, said the support for government price caps is all the more remarkable since regulating medical prices isn’t at the top of most politicians’ agenda. “It seems to be like a groundswell,” he said. “They’ve come to this decision on their own, rather than any policymakers leading them there, that something needs to be done.”

Other forms of government regulation, such as limits on medical debt collections, are even more popular.

About 8 in 10 Republicans backed a $2,300 cap on how much patients could be required to pay annually for medical debt, according to a by Perry’s polling firm, PerryUndem. And 9 in 10 favored a cap on interest rates charged on medical debt.

“These are what I would consider no-brainers, from a political perspective,” Ward said.

But GOP political leaders in Washington have historically shown little interest in government limits on what patients pay for medical care. And as Trump and his allies in Congress begin shaping their health care agenda, many Republican leaders have expressed more interest in cutting government than in expanding its protections.

“There is oftentimes a massive disconnect,” Ward said, “between what happens in the caucuses on Capitol Hill and what’s happening at family tables across America.”

We’d like to speak with current and former personnel from the Department of Health and Human Services or its component agencies who believe the public should understand the impact of what’s happening within the federal health bureaucracy. Please message Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News on Signal at (415) 519-8778 or .

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