GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — The candidates in Georgia's tight 7th District race met virtually for a debate on Wednesday night, touching on topics like how best to address the coronavirus pandemic, how to improve business conditions and how to foster bipartisanship in a sharply divided Congress.
The 7th District covers parts of Gwinnett and Forsyth counties, and will be voting for a new representative in the U.S. House, with Republican Rep. Rob Woodall retiring.
While polling has been limited, it suggests Dr. Carolyn Bourdeaux, the Democratic nominee, and Dr. Rich McCormick, the Republican, are very close.
Bourdeaux, a Georgia State professor with a background in public policy, was the Democratic nominee in 2018 as well, and lost the race to Wooddall by just 0.2%, about 400 votes in all.
In Wednesday night's debate, which was moderated by Gwinnett Chamber President & CEO Nick Masino, Bourdeaux said healthcare - and with it, addressing the ongoing pandemic - was her No. 1 priority.
"One of the big reasons I got into this race is because everyone needs quality, affordable healthcare," she said. "We have 120,000 people in this district without health insurance and it’s a moral issue to me that we hang our working people out to dry in this way. But it's also a fiscal issue, and each and every one of us pays for the uncompensated care in our own rising premiums."
McCormick, an emergency room doctor, said he felt similarly that healthcare was a pressing priority, but that "there's a fundamental difference about how we're going to approach that."
"I think we can get back to work as soon as possible using safe precautions, using social distancing, using masks, whatever you like, but letting businesses decide their own fate," he said. "Realize we're going to be facing this coronavirus for the rest of our lives - it's going to mutate, just like influenza does. We're going to have to continue to be vaccinated every single year for the new strain of coronavirus. It will be the cold, flu and coronavirus season."
He added that "we need to make sure that we have everybody covered in some way, shape or form, but we need to do it more economically and we do that by empowering people."
Bourdeaux countered that a principle cause for insurance being out of reach to so many people economically is that the Affordable Care Act - better known as Obamacare - has been deliberately sabotaged by Republicans in Congress.
She framed it as an original Republican plan, formulated by the Heritage Foundation and tested in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was that state's governor. But, when President Obama proposed it, "all of a sudden the Republicans decided to oppose it."
"And what they have since done is ripped the guts out of this plan, they have failed to fund it, which has caused the insurance rates on the exchange to skyrocket," Bourdeaux said.
McCormick argued the Affordable Care Act's issues were inherent, that the system was "failing long before President Trump became part of this."
"It was failing because it wasn’t well vetted," he said. "We need real healthcare solutions that cover everybody for preexisting conditions and are right for peoples' pocketbooks."
The candidates were also challenged, in an improvised question presented by Masino, to address how they would work across the aisle in a Congress that is often dysfunctional amid sharp ideological divides.
McCormick highlighted his efforts to get legislation addressing surprise medical billing passed. Those efforts resulted in the passing of H.B. 888 nearly unanimously in the Georgia legislature this year, but McCormick said it was the kind of bipartisan legislation that still needs to be addressed at the federal level.
"If you look at my start in politics 18 months ago, I didn’t know any politicians, I went down to the Capitol with a bipartisan group to solve a bipartisan problem, which was surprise billing," he said. "We were met by politicians who were particularly invested in lobbyists, and we really beat our head against the wall ... we finally got something passed this year for the first time in Georgia."
Bourdeaux, who was the director of Georgia’s Senate Budget and Evaluation Office from 2007-2010, pointed to her experience there and her past work as an aide to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden.
She said "every single piece of legislation I worked on with" with Sen. Wyden had a Republican co-sponsor, and she noted she ran the Georgia Senate Budget Office under Republican state leadership.
"Those budgets we passed, passed with broad bipartisan majorities, and so I am very aware of trying to work in a bipartisan fashion," she said. "I have to say, though, my concern is that I don’t see (politicians) having a line of sight to the people. They are not solving problems for people ... it's hard to see the way through if we're not talking about solving problems on behalf of people in this district, and that’s the starting point for me."
Bourdeaux and McCormick are scheduled to debate again on Oct. 13 as part of the Atlanta Press Club debate series, at 7 p.m. That can be seen on the Atlanta Press Club Facebook page and Georgia Public Broadcasting.