On The Issues
Make Housing Affordable Again and Renewing Access to the American Dream
Too many working families are struggling to achieve the American Dream of home ownership. Blocking private equity firms from buying single-family homes will help reduce the cost of housing and stop forcing hard working Americans to make from settling for a life of renting instead of home ownership. Brett will also work to reduce unnecessary regulations on the construction of new, single-family homes and to create incentives for developers to build new homes faster.
A Trade and Economic Policy Focused on Creating a Fair Global Playing Field
No American should ever have to train their foreign replacement. Brett will work to end the migrant visa scam that sees workers’ wages undercut and tech jobs taken by foreigners with no loyalty to our country. Brett will also support President Trump’s trade policy of expanding access to foreign markets for America’s manufactured goods, services, and agricultural products.
Reopening Rural Hospitals and Healthcare Policy
Our rural hospitals face closure at an unprecedented rate, putting the lives of seniors, families, and children at risk by denying them access to emergency medicine and making immediate care unaccessible. Brett will work to reverse this through smart changes to the policies that caused this decline in the first place and through modes of greater access to private healthcare plans.
We must start by setting caps on punitive damages in medical malpractice cases. This will reduce the cost of practicing medicine and create an incentive doctors to practice as OBGYNs. If we had limited malpractice awards 20 years ago, we would not be dealt with an extreme shortage of OBGYNs today in Missouri and across the U.S. By limiting these awards now with punitive caps, doctors will have an immediate incentive to reenter this area of medicine because of the shortage of medical professionals in the area and the ongoing demand for specialists in women’s health.
Reversing the closure of rural hospitals and alleviating the strain on metropolitan hospitals that comes with rural patients having to seek medical care at metropolitan health centers requires a multi-pronged approach to create higher demand for localized care in rural areas. The three pronged policy approach laid out below will not only create greater market demand by giving rural citizens access to health plans that allow them to seek medical care locally, it will significantly improve healthcare quality and access for our veterans, small business owners, and farmers.
(1) Creating VetCare under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services modeled on Medicare – This would reduce the cost of providing expanded healthcare coverage to our veterans because Medicare provides care with significantly less administrative overhead costs than our current VA healthcare system. The bulk of our retired veterans live in rural areas around America. The healthcare quality at VA hospitals has improved over recent years but varies widely. The VA faces heavy bureaucratic restrictions of the availability of care for veterans, especially where disability is concerned. VA hospitals are located only in a few cities throughout any given state as well, making access very difficult for many veterans. By creating VetCare, we increase veterans’ options for care and afford them localized healthcare within their communities. This creates additional demand for local care which changes the calculous for owners of rural hospitals.
(2) Remove the restrictions on doctors owning hospitals – the ban on physician owned hospitals is based on theoretical fear of doctors prioritizing non-medicare and medicaid patients. The risks the policy was designed to protect never materialized. The ban should be removed. To maintain great healthcare in all parts of American, both metropolitan and rural, we need to encourage doctors to move to rural areas and set up medical practices and buy into hospital partnerships. To incentivize young doctors to settle in rural areas, we would create “Docs for America,” which would forgive some medical student loans if the doctors agree to maintain their practice in a rural area for 10 or more years or more. Allowing them to buy hospitals in rural communities means their compensation would be tied to the performance of the hospital and quality of hospital care. This would improve access to quality doctors at local hospitals and incentivize doctors to provide sustainable practices to Americans who cannot easily access medical care at city hospitals due to distance and travel access.
(3) Association health plans to expand access to affordable health insurance coverage – These plans could replace the Obamacare online marketplace over time and drastically reduce the expenditures of the government in subsidizing individual health care insurance purchases. Association health plans allow small business owners and their employees as well as farmers and agricultural workers to buy in to HMO and PPO plans jointly, giving them the same power to bargain down plan premiums as companies like Walmart and Amazon and providing those covered with greater options in the types and scope of the plans available. Buying into association health plans means small businesses can compete with large companies in terms of overhead costs and attract employees with better benefits to compete the large employers. It also minimizes financial risk for insurers due to the larger group plans helping to bring down costs for all Americans. This also allows for greater access to localized healthcare because the association health plans would be purchased geographically and, in some instances, by specific industries.
These are common sense approaches that can improve the lives of our veterans, farmers, and small business owners and reopen local hospitals at the same time by changing the calculus for profitability due to increased local demand. They are also popular solutions that significantly reduce costs and save money for the government and patients by reduce overhead costs for the entire healthcare industry while improving access to healthcare throughout the United States.
Keep Promises to Our Veterans
Brett will fight to expand medical choice for our veterans so they can receive the care they need from the doctors and facilities that serve them best, rather than being dependent solely on the VA. Brett would like to see the first $200,000 exempted from federal income taxes for veterans. Brett will also hire dedicated staff in the district to help veterans navigate government hurdles around the benefits they are owed.