LITTLE ROCK — Recent developments in Arkansas’ U.S. Senate race illustrate what a tricky subject the federal Affordable Care Act is for both the Democratic and the Republican candidates to discuss.

LITTLE ROCK — Recent developments in Arkansas’ U.S. Senate race illustrate what a tricky subject the federal Affordable Care Act is for both the Democratic and the Republican candidates to discuss.

U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., who voted for the law, is locked in a tough re-election fight with U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Dardanelle, who has voted multiple times to repeal the law. Pryor released a television ad last week that touts aspects of the law without ever naming it.

The ad features Pryor and his father, former U.S. Sen. David Pryor, discussing the younger Pryor’s 1996 diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, clear-cell sarcoma.

"No one should be fighting an insurance company while you’re fighting for your life," Mark Pryor says. "That’s why I helped pass a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick or deny(ing) coverage for pre-existing conditions."

Those protections are provided by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, but the law’s name and nickname are not mentioned in the ad.

Meanwhile, during a news conference Thursday with former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Cotton continued to advocate repealing the Affordable Care Act but spoke favorably of state innovations like Arkansas’ private option, which has used federal money — made available for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act — to subsidize private health insurance for more than 170,000 low-income Arkansans.

"When we start over to get it right, one thing we can do is take all Medicaid funding, cut a lot of the red tape, a lot of the regulations and rules that we impose on states, and return that responsibility to the states so they can innovate, not just for a small population but for their entire population," he said. "Our population here in Arkansas is very different from other states, and states should be able to find their own solutions to craft for health care reform for people who need access."

Romney, who oversaw state-level health care reforms as governor of Massachusetts that served as a model for the Affordable Care Act, joined Cotton in slamming the federal law while praising state innovation. He mentioned some popular provisions of the federal law that he said could be included in state-level approaches.

"I like the idea of states being able to fashion their own solutions to get all their people insured, to make sure that young people can be covered on their parents’ health care plan, to make sure that pre-existing conditions are accommodated in the insurance system," Romney said.

Cotton and Pryor "are both in a situation where they have to thread the needle," said Janine Parry, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas.

Parry said both campaigns presumably are doing their own polling to determine how best to tailor their messages on this complex issue. She said Pryor’s approach is to "talk about what is benefiting people, tell a human interest story, but don’t mention Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act or the federal government."

Meanwhile, Parry said Cotton also is walking a fine line, criticizing the federal law but not the benefits that Arkansans have obtained.

Earlier this month, a Gallup survey was released showing that in the first six months of 2014 Arkansas reduced its uninsured population from 22.5 percent to 12.4 percent, the biggest reduction in the nation.

Parry said the rhetoric in the health care debate has been toned down in general.

"The shift is one that reflects the reality out there in the American public," she said. "Many people in Arkansas and elsewhere still don’t like government intervention on the scale of the Affordable Care Act in the abstract, but they sure like the individual provisions because they know people who’ve benefited from them."