Our health care system is a mess. Health care costs are eating up family budgets and swallowing small businesses. The surest way to make the mess even worse is to give government more control. Amy Klobuchar talks about "universal" and single payer health care. That's politician speak for government run health care. She wants more government involvement, more bureaucracy and more rules from Washington. Mark Kennedy is committed to putting patients and doctors in charge of health care. It's basic common sense.
We also need to end junk lawsuits that are driving up the cost of health care and running good doctors out of business. Mark Kennedy supports medical liability reform. Lake View Memorial Hospital in two Harbors is out of the baby business. A group of family physicians that had delivered 25 to 30 babies a year closed shop because of the high cost of malpractice insurance. Now families who wake up in the middle of the night when the baby is due have to go an extra hour to get to hospitals in Duluth or Grand Marais. When doctors lose, they lose big, with trial lawyers taking the lions' share. Amy Klobuchar has taken over $600,000 from lawyers and law firms. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that she is going to side with trial lawyers, not doctors, when it comes to medical liability reform.
With most uninsured individuals belonging to a family where someone works, it is critical that we make it easier for small businesses to afford health care. One way to do this is to allow small businesses to pool risks through small business health plans, so that they can purchase insurance at the same discounts as big businesses. This would help bring Fortune 500 benefits to Main street.
This legislation has passed repeatedly in the House with Mark Kennedy's support but was just recently again blocked by Democrat obstruction in the Senate. A vote for Mark Kennedy is a vote to help fix this broken health care system.
Russ Winans
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Park Rapids
