Seven Days in June is right: health is primary. From June 1 to June 7, local organizations and advocates across the country are being called to demand that local, state, and federal leaders explain how they will protect and strengthen America’s health systems. The campaign is decentralized, nonpartisan, and focused on how funding cuts will devastate local communities. (Seven Days in June)
But I want to say the quiet part out loud:
Health awareness is not enough if votes are suppressed, districts are manipulated, ballots are confusing, or communities are blocked from holding power accountable.
Health equity depends on democracy.
The American Public Health Association has said clearly that achieving health equity requires ensuring that all people have a voice in the political process. APHA also says public health researchers and practitioners should examine voting laws and policies as determinants of health. (American Public Health Association)
That means voting rights, fair maps, clear ballots, and accountable elections are not side issues. They are health issues.
The people elected from these districts decide whether hospitals stay open, whether Medicaid is protected, whether HIV prevention is funded, whether reproductive health is accessible, whether public health systems are trusted, and whether Black, LGBTQ+, immigrant, rural, disabled, and low-income communities are treated as constituents or afterthoughts.
That is why the current redistricting fights matter.
In Virginia, an emergency appeal was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court after the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated a voter-approved redistricting measure. AP reported that the blocked measure would have created four additional winnable U.S. House seats for Democrats and that the appeal comes amid a national mid-decade redistricting fight intensified by a recent Supreme Court ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act. (AP News)
My State, Georgia, is moving too. Gov. Brian Kemp has called a June 17 special legislative session to redraw state and congressional districts for future elections after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The Guardian reported that the session will focus on revising district lines for the state legislature and Congress, and that the effort could target the district of U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Black member of Congress who has served since 1993. (The Guardian)
Closer to home, Kemp also signed a law requiring nonpartisan elections for most local officials in Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. AP reports that the law removes party labels in the five most populous metro Atlanta counties, moves many affected elections to May, and prompted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston to promise a constitutional challenge. (AP News)
Let’s call this what it is: a so-called nonpartisan ballot can still have deeply partisan consequences.
Party affiliation is one of the few shortcuts many voters have in low-information local races. Removing it does not make power neutral. It can make power harder to see.
And this is happening while Georgia faces a health-care cliff.
A November 2025 report from Georgia Health Initiative and Manatt Health projects that H.R. 1 and the expiration of enhanced ACA premium tax credits will increase the number of uninsured Georgians by nearly half a million and reduce funding flowing into Georgia’s health-care delivery system by more than $50 billion by 2034. The report projects 32,000 Medicaid recipients and 460,000 Georgia Access enrollees losing insurance, $51.1 billion in health-care revenue losses, 46,500 lost jobs, and $326 million in lost tax revenue.
Those are not spreadsheet numbers.
Those are appointments, prescriptions, emergency rooms, cancer screenings, HIV visits, maternity care, mental health referrals, and rural hospitals trying to keep the lights on.
And yes, rural MAGA Georgia needs to sit with these numbers too.
I am not saying rural voters deserve the harm. Nobody deserves to lose a hospital, an insurance card, a clinic, or a chance at timely care. But I am saying rural MAGA Georgia does not get to pretend this is someone else’s crisis. The same politics that target Black voters in metro Atlanta and strip party labels from local ballots are also tied to federal health-care changes that will hit rural hospitals, rural coverage, and rural families hard. The cruelty may be marketed toward “other people,” but the consequences are coming home.
The clinic does not close only for Democrats.
Georgia Health Initiative projects that hospitals in rural counties will lose nearly $626 million from federal financing cuts, and that many of those hospitals are already financially constrained. The same report projects that 91,274 newly uninsured Georgians will live in rural areas — about 20% of the newly uninsured population — a disproportionate share compared with rural Georgia’s population.
So, these are questions every voter should be asking, regardless of party:
Who benefits when people lose coverage and lose political clarity at the same time?
Who benefits when health-care cuts move forward while maps are redrawn?
Who benefits when local ballots hide party affiliation in the very counties where Black political power has grown?
Who benefits when rural voters are told to fear their neighbors while their own hospitals are put at risk?
AP reported that Donald Trump won Georgia in 2024 by making slight but significant improvements across numerous small and rural deeply red counties. (AP News) Those voters deserve to know what is being done in their name. Metro Atlanta voters deserve to know why their local ballots are being changed. Black voters deserve to know whether their districts are being protected or diluted. People living with HIV, people seeking reproductive care, trans people, disabled people, seniors, and working families deserve to know whether the systems they rely on will survive.
Health is on the ballot.
But that only matters if the ballot is fair, clear, counted, and connected to accountability.
As a Black gay man living with HIV for 30 years, I have learned that survival is never just about medicine. Medicine matters. Insurance matters. Clinics matter. Community matters. But policy decides who gets access, and democracy decides who gets to shape policy.
That is why I cannot separate HIV advocacy from voting rights.
I cannot separate reproductive freedom from redistricting.
I cannot separate Medicaid from ballot access.
I cannot separate public health from whether Black communities are counted, represented, and heard.
The communities most harmed by health inequity are often the same communities whose political power is most aggressively managed, diluted, or obscured.
That is not a coincidence.
That is the system doing what it was designed to do.
WHAT CAN YOU DO? GET INVOLVED!!!
Share this article — and then do something with it.
Awareness is not the finish line. It is the starting point. Send this to someone who thinks health-care cuts will not touch them. Send it to someone in rural Georgia. Send it to someone in metro Atlanta. Send it to someone who votes every year and someone who has almost given up.
Then take the next step:
Save HIV Funding — Join the campaign to protect federal HIV, STI, viral hepatitis, substance use prevention, care, treatment, support services, and HIV research funding. The campaign calls on Congress and policymakers to reject cuts that would set the HIV response back decades. (Save HIV Funding)
Seven Days in June: Health Is Primary — Find or organize an event during the June 1–7 national week of action. Organizers are calling for town halls, candidate forums, scorecards, rallies, demonstrations, AIDS Memorial Quilt displays, and clear commitments from elected officials to protect and strengthen America’s health systems. (Seven Days in June)
U.S. People Living with HIV Caucus — Join or support the national network of people living with HIV. The Caucus promotes the meaningful involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS and represents a national PLHIV-led advocacy voice. (HIV Caucus)
One Nation, Overcharged — Visit One Nation, Overcharged and connect the affordability fight to the health-care access fight. Premiums, deductibles, drug prices, hospital bills, and corporate profiteering are part of the same story.
And for Georgia voters: read the Georgia Health Initiative report. Bring those numbers to every town hall, candidate forum, county commission meeting, church conversation, barbershop conversation, clinic waiting room, and family group chat.
Because the clinic does not close only for Democrats.
The hospital does not ask how you voted before it cuts services.
And democracy does not protect health unless voters make it.
Health equity depends on democracy.
And if we are serious about health being primary, then democracy has to be part of the prescription.