Ohio’s U.S. Senate race is one of the most expensive in the nation, with ad spending topping half a billion dollars this week. On Oct. 27, the ad tracking site AdImpact said the race had surpassed $500 million in advertising, including future reservations. This week, the Statehouse News Bureau is diving into the race for U.S. Senate, focusing on important policy issues the candidates have talked about in interviews and at events.
The cost of insurance has climbed sharply in Ohio, with premiums for private health insurance expected to increase more than 10%, according to the website healthinsurance.org. Incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted blames his Democratic opponent Sherrod Brown in an ad that aired in October from No Going Back PAC, a political action committee that backs Husted.
“For decades, Sherrod Brown's protected big insurance and their profits. Brown gives them billions. They give him hundreds of thousands. Sherrod Brown, a shill for big insurance, a shame for Ohio," the ad said.
The ad is based on a claim that Brown, who’s trying to return to the Senate after losing re-election in 2024, took $240,000 from big insurance companies for his support for policies that benefited them. That claim has no evidence. Brown has his own attack on Husted; he posted this excerpt from a speech on his Facebook page in August.
“Jon Husted voted not once, not twice, nine times against lowering health insurance premiums," Brown said in the video. "Why? He's taking $700,000 from the same insurance companies that are jacking up premiums in Ohio."
Meanwhile, premiums for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans in Ohio jumped by an average of 18% this year, according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. And more than 161,000 fewer Ohioans were enrolled in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans in February 2026 than a year earlier, a decline of 32.4%. The drop followed the expiration of enhanced federal subsidies to the Affordable Care Act at the end of 2025, which made coverage more expensive for many consumers. Last December, Brown said 490,000 Ohioans will lose health care coverage over the next decade with the end of those ACA subsidies as well as changes to Medicaid.
“People who have lost their health insurance because of Jon Husted’s vote could fill Ohio Stadium almost five times over. That’s how many people will lose their health insurance," Brown said in an interview.
But Husted said in December Brown is to blame for what’s happened in health care because of his votes during his time in the Senate.
“I want Ohioans to know I'm trying to fix his his mistakes," Husted said in an interview. "I'm working across party lines to try to to build consensus over renewing the premium tax credit, but also eliminating the fraud. I think the American taxpayers are tired of the fraud that goes on in the health care system, and particularly for working people.”
Premiums aren’t the only health care costs going up. Prescription drug prices have soared too. Brown said at a August campaign stop in Steubenville that was captured by C-SPAN he wants to cap those costs.
"We've got to first of all put a cap on prescription drug prices the way we did with insulin a couple of years ago from people on Medicare," Brown said. "We should have the government do it the way we do it at the VA; negotiate drug prices. You shouldn't pay more for a pill here than you pay in Canada."
Husted sponsored a bill that he said would lower prices by modernizing the process of allowing more prescription drugs to be sold over the counter. But he’s also said ending fraud in Medicaid will cut costs. He said in a telephone town hall in June that last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts Act, which had been called the One Big Beautiful Bill, included anti-fraud requirements that will reduce improper payments and save money.
Husted said a provision in that act was directed at states "to require them to more frequently check eligibility to make sure that the people that are using these programs are actually eligible and not stealing from it. And it's estimated that will save billions and billions of dollars when we do that."
More than three million Ohioans are on Medicaid. The One Big Beautiful Bill makes changes that advocates said could remove more than half a million Ohioans from the Medicaid rolls. Husted has praised the economic benefits of that act, while Brown has said his opposition to that act was a reason he wanted to run to return to the U.S. Senate.
