- Associated Press - Thursday, March 30, 2017

MORGANTON, N.C. (AP) - The voters in western North Carolina who sent U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows to office expected him to remain a Republican outsider. So they aren’t surprised he helped lead an effort that scuttled his party’s attempt to reform the nation’s health care laws.

But his supporters are also carefully watching to make sure he works as hard to find solutions as he has at fighting establishment Republicans and Democrats.

“He’s doing just what I want him to do. Maybe soon people up there will start listening to him,” said Jeff Deal who voted for Meadows in his initial race in 2012 and sent him back to the U.S. House two more times.

Deal cuts hair in Morganton - on the eastern edge of Meadow’s 200-mile wide district that stretches from the hardscrabble far western part of North Carolina, through the ritzy highlands around Asheville with all of its retirees and down Interstate 40 to former textile towns like Morganton and Marion.

Meadows immediately began challenging Republican leaders. He pushed for a government shutdown to try to force a showdown over the health care law passed by then-President Barack Obama and filed a motion to vacate the chair in what ended up being a successful effort to run Republican House Speaker John Boehner out of town.

Meadows is an integral part of the Freedom Caucus of about 30 conservative Republicans who refused to support current GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan’s bill to overhaul Obama’s health care law because they thought it did too little to change the health insurance system.

Deal and his wife both cut hair and are self-employed. He said as he gave a customer a trim in a Morganton barber shop that his $240 a month health care insurance premium climbed more than $700 after Obama signed the new health care law in 2010. His deductible went from $1,500 for the both of them to $5,000 each.

“I’m not sure what the answer is on health insurance. But I know it isn’t Obamacare and from what I saw, it wasn’t the other plan either,” Deal said.

About 63 percent of voters in Meadows’ 11th Congressional District voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. And plenty of Meadows supporters agree that the blame for the health care bill falling apart isn’t on Meadows or Trump, but instead on Ryan.

They do give some small warning that Meadows needs to try hard to find common ground with other Republicans.

“I voted for President Trump and when he won, I thought that would bring Republicans together,” said Don Lee, a 77-year-old retiree from Hendersonville.

People who voted against Meadows are watching carefully too, hoping that if he continues to anger people in his own party, it could allow an opening for a Democratic challenger.

John Evers hasn’t voted for Meadows yet and said he will be happy if a new health care bill is never passed.

“I never thought I would agree with Mark, but he did manage to do one thing recently that I liked - his efforts managed to keep Obamacare around,” the 63-year-old retiree from Hendersonville said.

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Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP . His work can be found at https://bigstory.ap.org/content/jeffrey-collins .

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