Beth Macy

Beth Macy was born in Ohio and lived most of her life in Roanoke, Virginia. Her career experience includes being an author. She previously worked as a reporter for The Roanoke Times for 25 years.[1]

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Campaign websiteMacy's campaign website stated the following:Creating a More Affordable VirginiaHard-working Americans deserve affordable housing and food—and the ability to depend on the services we were promised.Congress needs to stop ongoing attempts to privatize programs that have long been part of the American social contract, including Medicare and Veterans Administration benefits. Under Trump, even Social Security has come under attack; it’s now a $15.4 billion agency run by someone with no management experience. Congress should raise the cap on Social Security taxes so the wealthy pay their fair share. Republican politicians want to ruin these programs so they can privatize them for the benefits of their rich friends. Six million Social Security cases are currently moldering on a backlog.Congress should create incentives for state and local governments to enact reforms that pave the way for more affordable housing, including zoning reform. Ben Cline doesn’t even know how federal housing grants work, that they helped fund housing for 41 formerly homeless families in the Roanoke Valley! He stood silent as the Trump White House illegally cut the Continuum of Care program by 70 percent, even though that funding was already approved by Congress. We need a representative who will do his or her homework and fight to build, not abandon, critical affordable housing when Roanoke and Harrisonburg each now have more than 4,000 people on a wait list for housing choice vouchers. The list is so large they’re not even accepting new applicants.Congress needs to reduce the price of food by cracking down on corporate profiteering, preventing Big Ag from secretly colluding to keep prices high. It should end tariffs, which are really a tax on purchased items. (A pound of ground beef now costs more than the federal minimum wage.) Blanket tariffs shut farmers out of overseas markets and make imported farming equipment more expensive. Allow farmers to the “right to repair” their own equipment without voiding their warranties and letting corporations fatten their pockets. Farmers are getting squeezed from all sides. “We’re worse off today than when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle,” said Jack Dixon, a Rockingham County farmer and school-bus driver, explaining that three corporations now control 68 percent of the nation’s meat.Rockingham County is the state’s powerhouse for agribusiness, responsible for more than 13,000 jobs regionally in agriculture. Augusta, Shenandoah, and Page counties also help make agriculture the No. 1 economy in Virginia, generating $1.2 billion statewide annually. Between 2020 and 2025, Virginia lost 18 percent of its family-owned farms. We should end Trump’s ruinous trade wars so that farmers can sell their products for a fair price in a fair market. For every dollar spent on food, just 12 cents now goes to the farmer who raised the product. I will protect the federal crop insurance safety net.Voters don’t want the government to take care of us—we want the government to level the playing field so we can take care of ourselves rather than skew it in favor of billionaires.Healthcare Should Be a Human RightWe need better, more affordable healthcare.The GOP had 15 years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare, and it did nothing. Twenty-one percent of CD-6 residents are currently on Medicaid, and many benefited from ACA subsidies that just expired, massively increasing premiums. Do we really want premiums for small business owners like hairdresser Allison Greeley of Roanoke going from $200 to $1,200 a month? With more uninsured people visiting emergency rooms for basic care, everyone’s insurance premiums will dramatically increase. In the meantime:Look for drug overdoses to spike again. Virginia’s expansion of Medicaid allowed increased access to effective treatment for substance-use disorders and played a major role in reducing overdose deaths. With 350,000 Virginians soon to lose their Medicaid, “addiction treatment will be set back 20 years,” according to Roanoke’s Dr. Cheri Hartman, especially for young men disproportionately dying from overdose and suicide. Having written two books about the opioid crisis, including “Dopesick,” I know treatment works when it’s easier to access than dope.Look for our veterans to wait longer to receive less efficient health care. The Republicans and Ben Cline voted three times in 2025 alone to cut VA benefits, claiming falsely that the most efficient health system in our nation suffers from fraud, waste and abuse. Almost 40,000 VA employees lost their jobs in 2025 through DOGE-pushed buyout offers and attrition, with 35,000 more pink slips predicted to land. I support fully funding and staffing VA because VA works well, with years of research proving that it’s better, faster, and less expensive than the private sector. In contrast, Cline voted to privatize VA, following the Project 2025 playbook, and to cut funding for PACT ACT healthcare for disabled veteransLook for rural communities to bear the brunt of OBBB and veteran cuts. In Augusta and Rockbridge counties, three clinics closed in the aftermath of Trump/Cline’s OBBB. A Fishersville hospital, Augusta Health, has projected $40 million in operating debt by 2034. Cuts at the Salem VA will impact 78,000 patients and providers.I will fight for universal healthcare coverage including Medicare for All so that anyone can join and stop worrying about how they’ll pay for an emergency room visit or a hospital stay. A majority of voters support this approach. Medicare for All will let seniors age in place. It guarantees that everyone will have healthcare rather than be at the mercy of private health insurance companies or not have any coverage at all. It’s our surest path to stave off the health care deserts Cline promotes.In Virginia, eight rural hospitals are at immediate risk of closure at a time when rural residents’ lifespan is already two-three years behind urban residents’. Rural mothers are dying in childbirth at twice the rate of urban moms, a situation that will only make hospital closures more dire.Why are we spending more on health care but getting sicker? Everyone in the world’s richest country should be able to see a doctor and get the medicine they need without going broke.Billionaires Must Pay Their Fair ShareHow to pay for expanded healthcare: Billionaires need to pay their fair share.Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk now own the equivalent of half of all Americans’ wealth. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans don’t even have enough savings to cover a $40 emergency expense. A billionaire has 20,000 times as much money as you do, and that’s just the guy with $1 billion. Do you think a billionaire is paying 20,000 times as much income tax as you are? Chances are, he’s found ways to invest in shell companies, offshore accounts, trusts, and complex financial transactions to avoid paying anything at all. Big Tech ruined our fact-based media ecosystem because our leaders failed to regulate the billionaires, causing rampant misinformation designed to divide us, steal our data, and sell us stuff—a toxic place where lies spread six times faster than the truth. Meanwhile, Trump and Cline have given the wealthy trillions in tax breaks; we should raise them and make sure they’re enforced by:Regulating Big Tech, which profits off damaging children, scamming seniors, and tricking consumers.Fairly taxing capital gains. Stock market gains are the primary vehicle for increasing wealth. Recent stock rallies added over $5 trillion in wealth for the top 10 percent in just one quarter, with the top 1 percent seeing massive gains. Making sure corruption doesn’t go unpunished by our leaders. Cline is not a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Stock Trading Ban discharge petition, a wildly popular bill supported by 90 percent of Americans that would forbid members of Congress from trading stocks.Billionaires need to pay for the harms they’ve inflicted.Fixing the Education CrisisWe must address the crisis in education.Higher ed research is being gutted, a huge threat to Roanoke, where health care and education are our largest economic drivers. The Fralin Biomedical Research Center—one of the nation’s fastest-growing institutes and Roanoke’s biggest incubator for high-salary jobs—has already lost $11 million in NIH funding in the wake of DOGE cuts and was forced to lay off workers from a groundbreaking research project.We need to invest in job training happening in community colleges and high schools, creating direct workforce pathways to local industries. Expanding locally grown small- and medium-sized businesses helps workers and employers alike.Sen. Tim Kaine’s Pell for workforce initiative will particularly help rural students (who struggle with transportation) as traditional and nontraditional students alike can now get funding to take short-term courses at community colleges in welding, medical technology, nursing, culinary arts, and the like. While not everyone should have to go to college to get a good job, everyone who wants to go should be able to afford it. We should double Pell grants, which helped me claw my way out of poverty by paying the full freight of my four-year tuition in the 1980s (whereas now those grants cover just 30 percent). Pell grants pay for themselves in just 10 years’ time, through the grantees’ increased income taxes. The CD-6 is rich with private four-year institutions that support local economies and rely on Pell and Virginia’s Tuition Assistant Grants for survival. We have one of the largest concentrations of colleges in the country; when they are hurting because students can’t afford to go, the communities around them also hurt.LBJ said it best when he introduced the Higher Education Act of 1965, declaring that the answer to all the problems of the world comes down to a single word—education.Addressing Our Immigration DisasterOur immigration crisis is both a humanitarian and workforce disaster.America must restore/preserve legal pathways for permanent legal status and/or citizenship. Immigrants have always been a key part of America’s story, and Virginia relies on them in particular for elder care and manual labor in agriculture and construction. And yet it has been 40 years since Congress passed significant immigration reform. Efforts to pass a rigorous and fair bipartisan reform bill were blocked by Trump with help from Cline and other enablers in 2024.Instead of deporting hardened criminals, Trump and Cline have worked to separate families, including nursing mothers and pregnant women, cruelly kidnapping people who have broken no laws, treating them like animals, sending many to foreign prisons—and terrifying law-abiding citizens who are here legally, using racial profiling and setting up de facto concentration camps. In some cases, American citizens have been targeted and killed. We must stop ICE from hurting our neighbors.Twenty percent of all child-care workers are immigrants; 23 percent are Latina. In 2025, 40,000 immigrant child-care workers were deported, greatly increasing the already too-high ratio of two children for every one child-care slot available in Western Virginia. Without immigrant labor, birth rates in Virginia and in the United States would need to rise by a third to meet workforce demands. We need long-term investment in our immigration justice system to insure humane conditions in detention centers as well as timely hearings. A cooperative approach should be taken with our allies toward finding lasting solutions.We need opportunity for all, not the chosen few.— Beth Macy's campaign website (July 9, 2026)Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.