I made my regular appearance on Tyler Englander’s Political Recap podcast for WRIC 8 News last week, and as usual, I talked too much. So we mostly ran out of time for Tyler’s last topic, which was U.S. Senator Mark Warner’s new healthcare bill. Tyler’s main question about this bill: is it a real thing, or just politics in an election year?

My quick answer: it’s both.

First, some background: Warner introduced a new bill last week into Congress called the Health for the Commonwealth through Affordability, Reform, and Expansion Act of 2026, or the Health CARE Act. (As state legislatures become more like Congress each year, I am dreading the moment when Virginia legislators fully adopt this Congressional practice using tortured acronyms to name their bills.)

The contents of the bill should not be surprising to anyone who has followed healthcare politics over the last few years. It repeals some of the funding cuts and restrictions put in place by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” extends controls and negotiations for drug pricing, and adds more insurance options for low income folks. The goal is to keep more people on public insurance programs, with the underlying argument that this would improve health outcomes and lower system costs overall.

One important thing to note: Mark Warner is running for re-election this fall. His Republican opponent, Bert Mizusawa, dismissed the healthcare bill as “political theater.”

Now Mizusawa has a point; Warner himself admitted that this bill can’t pass in the current Congress, with a Republican trifecta. But Warner’s also no dummy. (Except when it comes to tuna melts.) It’s a campaign year, and it helps voters if you can define the stakes for the election, especially on issues that you think the public is one your side. And healthcare is generally a winner for Democrats; people generally think the government should ensure people have coverage. And while they don’t always like government spending, people also don’t appreciate it when Republicans cut healthcare benefits.

So is what Warner doing political theater? Maybe, at least for HIS race against his Republican opponent. While I’m sorry to say this, poor Bert Mizusawa doesn’t have a shot. He’s raised less than 2% of the war chest that Warner has amassed, and with millions still in the bank, expect your feeds and screens to be flooded with images of Mark Warner Doing Good Things over the next month or two. Combine Warner’s prodigious fundraising with his long-term incumbency in a down year for Republicans and you can see why more viable contenders like Glenn Youngkin and Jason Miyares wanted nothing to do with this race.

But if Virginia’s Senate race has a foregone conclusion, that does NOT mean Warner’s healthcare bill is meaningless. This fall’s midterms in Virginia are of course part of a national election; but this year’s vote also may end up as a national referendum on the Trump Administration, and the President himself. Thanks in part to Trump’s dismal approval ratings, the Democrats believe they have a shot at not just winning back the House, but — if the math, and a Blue Wave, breaks right — the Senate as well.

So Warner’s bill serves a political purpose, sure. The bill is clearly laying out the stakes in this fall’s election, not just for Virginians, but for voters across the country. Healthcare, a signature issue for Democrats well before Obama’s massive expansion of coverage (and borked website), remains an important distinguishing policy between them and the Republicans.

This is good, actually. We should want politicians to lay out clear differences between the two parties. Warner here is signaling what you can expect a Democratic Congress to try and do. Maybe you don’t like what they would do, and maybe you do. But at least now you have a sense of what might happen, specifically, depending on how you vote this fall. Of course, with Trump in the White House, even a fully Democratic Congress is unlikely to get a healthcare bill past the President’s veto pen. But again, that just makes it clearer what the stakes are for 2028.

So as much as Warner will likely be making the case that he’s Doing Good Stuff for Virginians this fall, his healthcare bill is much more about Doing Good Stuff for the Democratic Party. But in the end it’s also Doing Good Stuff for voters, wherever they live, because it helps educate them. Politics is about choices, and Senator Warner’s healthcare bill gives us more information about the one facing us right now.

RICHARD MEAGHER is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia; he writes the RVA Politics newsletter on Substack.