Playing the rural healthcare card in race for governor of Georgia

I was excited to see this piece on Stacy Abrams' campaign for governor on the front page of today's New York Times.  The headline is, "Stacy Abrams Hopes Medicaid Expansion Can be a Winning Issue in Rural Georgia," and the lede of Abby Goodnough's story follows: 

For the upscale urban audience at a campaign town hall here, it would have been enough for Stacey Abrams to pitch Medicaid expansion as a moral issue — the health-care-as-human-right argument that appeals to progressives everywhere. 

Instead, Ms. Abrams, the Democrat in the tossup race for Georgia governor, stuck to the pragmatic line of reasoning she has pushed in making Medicaid expansion a top priority of her campaign: It will help save the state’s struggling rural towns without busting its budget, since the Affordable Care Act requires the federal government to pay 90 percent of the cost. 

Goodnough quotes Abrams talk at Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college: 

Raise your hand if you would say no to someone who said, ‘Give me a dollar and I’ll give you $9 back.' It is economically false, a falsehood over all, to say we can’t afford to expand Medicaid.  

The story later continues:

By framing the expansion of government health coverage for the poor as a smart business move that would save teetering small-town hospitals and create thousands of jobs outside metro Atlanta, Ms. Abrams, an unabashed liberal, is hoping to add enough rural votes to her column to beat Brian Kemp, her Republican opponent, a Trump-style conservative who is against expanding Medicaid.