Issue Position: Health Care

Issue Position

My Background

I am passionate about improving the United States Health Care System. I have worked in the Charity/Public Hospital System as well as private practice for 20 years treating the uninsured and the under-insured. I co-founded a clinic which provides free dental and medical care to the working uninsured. I developed public health programs giving free hepatitis B vaccination to 36,000 school children at schools so that working moms, who could not miss work, could still have their children protected. As a teacher with LSU Medical School, I know that there is a shortage of primary care physicians and what this means for our nations health. I know from these experiences and others that Americans have an increasingly difficult time paying premiums and co-pays while their employers have a similarly difficult time continuing to find affordable insurance products to offer and that there must be innovative solutions.

Health care is a complex issue. I know firsthand the problems and have worked for solutions. As your next Congressman, I will work for real reform which insures access to quality health care for all Americans at a cost we can afford.

Solutions

Solutions must simultaneously address access, cost, and quality. Any plan that focuses on only one of these 3 things, or even 2, will fail. An example is that Medicare has expanded access for older Americans to physicians, hospitals and prescription drugs. While doing this, Medicare has ineffectively addressed cost. Now the Medicare trust fund is seriously underfunded potentially endangering this access that is so important. The American people have learned that while it is easy to say that we will give coverage to everyone, we must ask: "How is it paid for?".

We start by using the money we have to treat the uninsured and under-insured more effectively. This is why as a State Senator, I advocated changing how Louisiana uses its money for the uninsured. I opposed re-building the new Charity Hospital in New Orleans. To finance this $1,400,000,000 hospital, Louisiana will spend 50% of the tax money for the uninsured in South Louisiana in one city with 20% of the people. This money should be spent evenly depending on where people live, not concentrated in one place because of political pressure. We cannot ask taxpayers to pay higher taxes when we waste the money they already provide.

Real change would be for us to set up portability of insurance so that workers could keep their insurance if they changed jobs, allow interstate competition among insurance companies and establish insurance pools to expand the range of products for people to choose between. All these reforms would help more lower income Americans purchase private insurance.

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