Issue Position: Fixing a Broken Healthcare System

Issue Position

If we're going to resolve our challenges around healthcare, we can't wait for Washington, D.C.
If competition and choice were priorities in our healthcare system, we would have a system with incentives to reduce cost instead of incentives to increase volume. Whether you're an employer or a patient, Obamacare and the vast bureaucracy around it has reduced transparency, limited competition, and has made it harder to provide and obtain quality care.

It is time for Tennessee to lead the way in reforming our healthcare system.
Instead of relying on a new or expanded government program, we should turn our attention inward to Tennessee's own capacity to innovate.

We can create greater competition in the market for health coverage, and we can challenge the traditional model for delivering healthcare. We can reform anti-competitive rules that restrict where a hospital can locate or expand, empower medical professionals to work directly with patients, and reward the technological and business innovations that save costs and time for the consumer. As governor, I'll let the market work, by cutting unnecessary regulations, expanding options for direct primary care, and ensure that our state programs embrace innovative models for treatment and prevention.

We talk a lot about health care, but not enough about health.
Nearly a half-million Tennesseans and over a billion dollars in direct medical costs are due to lifestyle or behavioral diseases. A quarter-billion dollars of those excess costs were covered by TennCare.

We're facing a tsunami of chronic disease in Tennessee, and if we don't act soon it has the potential to take down our entire health care system. But we don't need a big government program to do it. As your governor, I'll work to improve our public coverage models to ensure patients take charge of their own health decisions, and we'll shift incentives for our healthcare providers to reward not just delivering care, but preventing unhealthy disease.

To overcome the opioid epidemic, we need a comprehensive approach that takes on the system that started it.
Last year over 1,500 Tennesseans died of an opioid overdose, and over 1,000 Tennessee children were born addicted to opioids.

This crisis can devastate a family, and it is devastating Tennessee. So as powerful new synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil make their way into Tennessee, we must empower law enforcement with the tools and resources they need to make Tennessee a state that drug traffickers fear to enter.

We also know that we cannot incarcerate someone out of addiction. As governor, I will support and invest in sustainable, community-based options that give non-violent addicts a path back to society.

It's a problem we can't beat overnight, but if we work together we can save lives.

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