Darline Graham, who just sashayed into the Senate seat of her late brother, Lindsey Graham, likes to tell a story about her parents. They both passed away fairly suddenly—her mother of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her father of a heart attack. She was a preteen at the time, and it’s a compelling tale that lands well with audiences.
But its latest iteration has gone viral for another reason: She juxtaposed her parents’ death with a condemnation of “government-run health care” in a way that inadvertently makes a strong case in its favor. And a glance back at Lindsey Graham’s 2015 self-published memoir—which extensively recounts the passing of the parents—further reinforces the point.
Darline Graham—who was appointed to her late brother’s South Carolina seat after his July 11 death—told this story during her victory speech after winning the state’s snap GOP primary, which sets up a general election contest against (as it happens) a doctor named Annie Andrews:
Darline Graham: Government run health care…. bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs it all. I have a different background. My parents worked long, hard hours. If that were sick, they had to get up and go to work. My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over… pic.twitter.com/fvFCrmudhi
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2026
You’ll see that Darline Graham cites “government-run health care” among a litany of evils that Andrews supposedly supports. She then segues into a discussion of her and her brother’s upbringing in living quarters behind a bar owned by her parents, to illustrate how her “vision” is “different” from that of Andrews.
“We didn’t take vacations—if they were sick, they had to go to work,” Graham continued. “My mother passed away when I was eleven, and my father just over a year later.”
Darline Graham’s vision, it seems, holds that because her own parents worked so hard, couldn’t take sick days, and died untimely deaths, others shouldn’t expect anything different. It’s a particularly clumsy rendition of the idea that anyone who works hard will automatically have health care access in keeping with what they justly merit in life, and only the lazy and undeserving would ask for Big Government health care.
“Darline unintentionally released her health care plan in that speech,” Andrews told me. “Her plan is, work hard even when you’re sick, until you die.”
Darline Graham’s tale about her parents is true enough. But when you dig into the details, her takeaway from it becomes even more surprising.
The deaths of her parents are recounted at length in Lindsey Graham’s memoir, My Story. Florence (the dad) and Millie (the mom) did work hard to keep their bar afloat, creating a community for its patrons. They did live in the back room as a tight-knit family. Millie got sick in the mid-1970s, not long after the young Lindsey enrolled at the University of South Carolina—where, incidentally, he benefited from in-state, or government-subsidized, tuition. Darline was 11 at the time.
What happened next was heartbreaking. Out of nowhere, Millie started complaining of chronic fatigue and nausea, and a doctor misdiagnosed the problem as menopause. But soon the symptoms worsened, and a second doctor diagnosed her with stage-four cancer. The very young Darline was informed by Lindsey and their father that her mother was dying, and was “distraught,” the book says.
Anyone with any humanity will empathize with the deep sadness of Lindsey’s account: the sudden and arbitrary crashing in of mortality on what only yesterday was blissful togetherness. The awareness that a loved one is staring into the abyss, all alone. The agonizing realization of how fleeting it all is, of our mysterious lack of control over our own fates, of the inexorable certainty—and seeming permanence—of death.
Millie appeared to have good health care, spending time in the hospital and undergoing chemotherapy, which the family may have paid for itself. But she couldn’t be saved. As Lindsey writes: “Her disease was diagnosed too late, and had spread too far.” Their father died soon after of a massive heart attack.
It’s unclear what, if anything, could have secured a different outcome for either parent. But here’s what we do know: “Government-run health care” can, and already does, avert premature deaths like these in very large numbers, and expanding it would avert many more of them.
This is particularly true of people like Darline Graham’s parents. She depicts them as hardworking and uncomplaining in life—as they appear to have been—but her dichotomy between them and undeserving leeches on the government doesn’t hold up. Putting aside her vile attitude toward the nonworking, the people who often lack health care today are the working poor. They have low-income jobs that don’t supply employer-based health care and can’t afford it themselves—all in spite of their hard work.
Indeed, extending health care to that population is one of the big successes of Obamacare—the “government-run health care” of Darline Graham’s nightmares—which has done this via subsidies on the exchanges and the federally funded expansion of Medicaid in 40 states that have opted into it. As Larry Levitt of the nonprofit KFF emailed me: “The ACA led to dramatic declines in the number of uninsured among low- and modest-income working people.”
What’s more, the Medicaid expansion—or “government-run health care”—has significantly improved mortality rates overall, including among those with specific conditions like cancer and cardiovascular disease. It has improved the timeliness of cancer diagnoses and care—likely averting fates similar to Millie Graham’s for untold numbers of people.
You’ll be shocked to hear that Darline Graham’s state of South Carolina is one of the 10 states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid. And according to KFF, tens of thousands of uninsured people in the state have low enough incomes to qualify for an expanded Medicaid, which of course they cannot now access. The result, as Andrews told me, is that “a lot of working poor people are uninsured and underinsured” and thus “cannot access routine preventative care.”
Meanwhile, let’s not forget about Donald Trump’s Medicaid cuts, which could knock millions off of coverage. And as Jonathan Cohn details, Trump’s destruction of our scientific research ecosystem could dramatically set back hopes for future breakthroughs in cancer cures and other treatments, including early detection.
Darline Graham would leave all that wreckage undisturbed. Andrews, by contrast, supports reversing Trump’s Medicaid cuts and expanding Medicaid, and also backs a public option—government health insurance that would compete against private insurance.
“I believe that Darline’s parents deserved better,” Andrews told me. “I believe that everyone in America deserves better.”
Darline Graham watched her parents suffer premature death at a very young age. Yet her worldview holds that the government cannot—and should not—involve itself in health care, as Obamacare and other Democratic proposals do, to avert this lot in life for others. Why should the hideous unfairness of our economic system—which in some ways is harder on the working poor than that of Darline Graham’s childhood—put so many of them at risk of the sort of untimely end that took her own parents away from her?
Perhaps Darline Graham truly believes, as her own words suggest, that anyone who cannot afford their own health care under the status quo justly deserves whatever fate awaits them. Perhaps South Carolina’s working people should keep that in mind as they choose their next senator.
