Republican Ohio Sec. of State Frank LaRose speaks during an election night watch party Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)

All three Ohio Republican Senate candidates either explicitly or implicitly endorse the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which is again threatened after former President Donald Trump pledged to eliminate and replace the law.

During a video call on Thursday, former pediatrician and Ohio State Rep. Beth Liston (D-Dublin) criticized the three GOP Senate candidates, businessman Bernie Moreno, Secretary of State Frank LaRose and former state senator Matt Dolan, for their positions against the ACA.

“Trump and the Ohio Senate Republican candidates are actively trying to take away our health care,” Liston said. “Make no mistake: Bernie Moreno, Frank LaRose and Matt Dolan would vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They would not hesitate to kick the nearly 2 million Ohioans with a preexisting condition off their coverage, raise prices for Ohioans and make it much harder for people to get the care they need.”

Moreno has been seen on video blaming the Affordable Care Act for “making health care much more expensive.”

Similarly, LaRose’s campaign website blames U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) for supporting “the Obamacare deception that premiums would decrease and the outright lie that patients would keeps [sic] their doctors.” After the Supreme Court first upheld the ACA in 2012, LaRose made a Facebook post where he said he was “committed now more than ever to work to repeal this bad law.”

Dolan’s campaign website also implies he would support an Obamacare alternative and says, “Obamacare was conceived wrongly, implemented poorly and has become a tool of partisan grift.”

Liston represents Ohio’s eighth district in the state House. She completed her doctorate in 2006 and had a 12-year career in medicine before transitioning to politics in 2018. On Thursday, she cited health care coverage and affordability as one of the main reasons for her career change.

“I remember what medicine was like before the Affordable Care Act,” Liston said. “Patients would come to the hospital struggling to breathe, having ignored a cough they had for a few months because they couldn’t afford to see a doctor. And I remember what it was like to tell them they had cancer which had spread and had they been in earlier, we might have been able to cure it, but now we’re just talking about the time they had left.”

According to statistics from the Economic Policy Institute, an estimated 964,000 Ohioans would lose their health insurance should the ACA be repealed.

“Then I also remember, right after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, those moments of gratitude that people expressed when they were finally able to get coverage and get treatments they needed. When they were able to go get regular checkups to prevent illness. Ohio has a lot of health problems, and the Affordable Care Act is critical to millions of families.”

Should Trump win in 2024 and again attempt to repeal the ACA, other potential ACA opponents running for positions in Congress include Wisconsin’s Eric Hovde, Montana’s Tim Sheehy and Pennsylvania’s David McCormick.