Affordable Healthcare

Here in the United States, we do not have a healthcare system. We have a healthcare marketplace. The marketplace for healthcare insurance is dominated by large conglomerates who are being federally subsidized for their service yet continue unvexed with predatory practices.

Healthcare costs are rising faster than inflation with one absolute certainty and that is that health insurance has grown far beyond affordable.

The situation just got worse. On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the Republican legislation known as the “Big, Beautiful Bill” into law. According to medicareadvocacy.org, this legislation cuts a trillion dollars from health programs. Those fortunate enough to still have healthcare coverage will see their premiums rise, while ten million Americans will lose their insurance entirely.

Breaking Up the Conglomerates

The first step toward fixing this broken system is ending the stranglehold of healthcare insurance conglomerates. We must modernize our antitrust laws and stop the predatory practices of corporations that are literally profiting from human suffering. These conglomerates receive federal subsidies with one hand while denying claims and raising premiums with the other. That cannot continue.

Medicare for Those Who Want It

Once we’ve addressed the monopolistic practices strangling our healthcare system, we can build something better: a “Medicare for those who want it” program that gives Americans real choice. There are currently several Medicare proposals being debated in Washington. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promote a plan that would create a government-run healthcare system. Pete Buttigieg and Senator Elissa Slotkin are championing “Medicare for those who want it,” which would place a public option in the ACA marketplace and let it compete directly with private insurance.

Americans want the freedom to choose, and “Medicare for those who want it” provides exactly that. If you’re happy with your employer-based health insurance, you can keep it. If you prefer your private insurance carrier, that’s your choice. But if you want a public option that prioritizes care over profits, that option should be available to you.

What Works in Both Plans

Both approaches include provisions I strongly support: empowering the NIH to negotiate drug pricing the same way the VA does for our veterans, limiting yearly out-of-pocket expenses for prescriptions, eliminating hidden “ghost charges,” and ending the practice of restricting patients to narrow healthcare networks. These are common-sense reforms that put patients first.

The Rural Healthcare Gap

But here’s where both national plans fall short: neither brings healthcare any closer to rural America. Both the Sanders/AOC plan and the Buttigieg/Slotkin plan acknowledge they would cover about eighty percent of Americans. That’s a problem when 38% of residents in Indiana’s 4th District live in rural areas.

Rural Americans shouldn’t be an afterthought. When the nearest hospital is forty-five minutes away and the only clinic in town just closed, having insurance doesn’t mean you have access to care. We need healthcare infrastructure investment in rural communities—clinics, telemedicine capabilities, loan forgiveness programs to bring doctors and nurses to underserved areas, and mobile health units that can reach people where they are.

A Commitment to Everyone

As your representative in Congress, I will fight to bring real healthcare access to rural America. I will not go to Washington and blindly sign on to legislation that raises taxes on all of us to make healthcare more affordable for most of us. That’s not good enough. We are in this together—all of us.

Every person in Indiana’s 4th District deserves access to quality, affordable healthcare, whether they live on Main Street or on a farm twenty miles from the nearest town. That means breaking up insurance monopolies, creating real choices through public options, negotiating fair drug prices, and investing in the healthcare infrastructure our rural communities desperately need.

Healthcare is a human right, not a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. It’s time we started treating it that way.