Sen. Jacky Rosen is teaming up with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to have Senate lawyers represent the chamber in a lawsuit in Texas that could result in the loss of protections requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

“The anxiety is palpable,” Rosen said at a press conference Tuesday of people she has heard from who are worried about losing coverage.

But the threat is broader given that “everyone is only one diagnosis away from” being affected by the lawsuit, she added.  

Rosen said that during her campaign, concerns over pre-existing conditions were the number one issue she heard about from voters. Along with guaranteeing coverage, the ACA also limited the premiums that can be charged to keep the coverage affordable. Rosen pledged to make the issue among her top priorities after she was elected last year.

A poll from just before the midterm election by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that health care was the top issue for voters in Nevada and Florida.

Nearly seven in 10 voters in both Nevada and Florida said that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who wants to maintain the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions even if it results in higher costs for healthy people. Those results included 60 percent of Republicans in Nevada and almost half in Florida.

“Without these critical protections we risk going back to the days when big insurance companies could deny insurance coverage to those who have a pre-existing condition,” Rosen said.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is also a co-sponsor of the resolution Rosen and Manchin introduced. Rosen led a similar effort in the House.

The case was brought by 20 Republican attorneys general who are challenging the ACA’s constitutionality after Congress removed the tax penalty associated with the law’s individual mandate to buy health insurance as part of a GOP-authored tax reform package enacted in 2017. The judge in the case ruled last month in favor of the GOP attorneys general, and the case is being appealed.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who also attended the press conference, said that the ruling was “bizarre and dreadful” and, should the GOP attorneys general prevail, would jeopardize “health care for more than 20 million Americans who gained insurance in the exchanges and protections for 133 million Americans living with pre-existing conditions.”

He predicted the ruling would be overturned.

Democrats in the House—who control the chamber after winning back the majority in the midterm elections—recently approved a similar resolution. But Democrats remain in the minority in the Senate, where Republicans control the agenda and are unlikely to take up the measure.

Schumer said that Democrats would look for any opportunity to force a vote on the resolution, but did not say if he had a legislative vehicle in mind to which to try to attach the measure. The Senate is currently at a standstill with Democrats voting against the chamber taking up other legislative business until a solution is found to the government shutdown.

Schumer also argued that Republicans should join with Democrats, noting that the issue hurt the GOP in the midterm elections.  

“All the Republicans who campaigned on protecting pre-existing conditions and haven’t signed on...are hypocritical,” he said. “You don’t talk about wanting to protect it and not do it when there is an obvious way to do it.”

Many Republicans campaigned on the issue of preserving protections for pre-existing conditions despite voting to repeal the ACA. In 2017, Republicans tried and failed to repeal the health-care law and the issue of pre-existing conditions complicated their efforts.

A GOP proposal—which passed by the House in 2017, with no Democratic votes, but failed in the Senate—sought to protect pre-existing conditions. However, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the bill would have increased premiums and other costs for more than 6 million people, making coverage more difficult to afford.

In response to the Texas lawsuit, nine Senate Republicans, including former Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, introduced legislation last summer to preserve two key portions of the 2010 health-care law that prevent insurance companies from denying coverage and charging higher premiums to patients with pre-existing conditions.

“Senate Democrats are not going to let this issue go away,” Schumer said.