Annie Andrews Wins South Carolina on Healthcare Costs

Card photograph: ARCHIVE. Annie Andrews speaks outside the shuttered Marlboro Park Hospital in Bennettsville, South Carolina, October 8, 2026. Photo courtesy of Dr. Annie Andrews for Senate, supplied in its public press release. Cropped for the card. Source photograph.

Pediatrician Annie Andrews has defeated Republican Senator Darline Graham in South Carolina, AP reports. Graham was appointed after her brother Lindsey Graham died earlier this year. Andrews enters the Senate with a program targeting insurers’ profits, treatment denials and drug prices.

Roll Call independently reports the victory. Graham was appointed in July and won a special Republican primary before the general election. Andrews, already the Democratic nominee when Lindsey Graham died, had to redirect a campaign originally built around challenging him.

Andrews’s Patients and Prices Plan takes aim at the power insurers and drug companies exercise over people seeking treatment. It calls for limits on excessive insurance profits and premium increases, an end to delays or denials of medically necessary care, and action on surprise bills.

She joins Iowa winner Josh Turek, who campaigned for a public insurance option and cancer-research funding. Andrews’s proposals focus on how coverage operates after a patient has obtained it, as well as expanding access.

Stimpus1, May 11, 2026. CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source photograph. License.

A doctor’s second campaign

AP’s full race report identifies Andrews as the first woman elected to represent South Carolina in the Senate. She had run unsuccessfully against Representative Nancy Mace in 2022. It was her first statewide campaign.

The candidates’ sole debate in October covered the economy, the Iran war and artificial intelligence, as well as attacks on each other’s qualifications. Graham had Trump’s endorsement and campaign support. Andrews entered the contest with medical experience and an earlier campaign behind her, but had never held public office.

The result ends a long electoral drought: Fritz Hollings, in 1998, was the last Democrat elected to the Senate from South Carolina. Republicans had held both seats since he left office in 2005. Andrews’s win therefore changes the party balance of the state’s delegation as well as who represents patients’ interests in federal healthcare debates.

Prices and permission to obtain treatment

Her drug-price proposals include a $35 monthly insulin cap, broader Medicare negotiating power and action against practices that keep cheaper generics off the market. These are proposed changes, not a description of protections already available to every patient.

An insurance policy can still leave a patient confronting high premiums, an unaffordable prescription or a denial of treatment. Andrews’s proposed profit and premium limits would address what insurers charge; restrictions on delays and denials would address their power to withhold access to care.

Hospitals and staff within reach

Andrews proposes reversing Medicaid cuts, expanding coverage in South Carolina, supporting rural hospitals and recruiting health professionals to underserved communities. For veterans, her plan calls for fully staffed and modernized VA facilities, expanded mental-health services and faster benefits for people exposed to toxic substances.

The rural and VA commitments address a separate obstacle from price: whether a staffed service exists nearby. A lower drug bill does not supply a clinician, and a coverage expansion cannot by itself keep a hospital open. Andrews’s plan combines restrictions on private intermediaries with public support for the facilities and workers who deliver care.