Last week Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward, a practicing emergency room doctor, released the Patient Power Plan to repeal Obamacare and provide an alternative approach centered around patients. This weekend she joined guest host Matthew Boyle to guide listeners through her plan.
Boyle first highlighted a few extremely prominent Democrats who have placed McCain among their favorite Republicans, including 2016 Democratic Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as likely incoming Senate Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
“It’s like a mutual admiration society over there between Hillary Clinton and John McCain,” Ward said to Boyle.
“They all seem to like him because of his moderate or Democrat-light willingness to sell this country down the road.”
Ward pointed to what she sees as McCain’s greatest shortcomings.
“He’s voted for tax hikes, he’s voted for massive new spending, he’s voted for bailouts, he voted for amnesty, he voted for liberal judges, it just goes on and on and on. Ya know that vote on the budget.”
Ward explained the she believes the votes show McCain’s “true heart” as a “big government Republican.”
Noting that McCain and Congresswoman Martha McSally (R-Tucson) were the only Arizona Republicans that voted for the budget, Ward said,
In the name of a strong defense they are willing to give up control of spending in this country and I believe in a strong defense, I believe in peace through strength, but we also have to have restraint and we have to reign in this uncontrollable spending that our country is doing because we are selling our kids, our grandkids, our great-grandkids down the road.
Boyle asked Ward, a practicing doctor, to walk the listening audience through her plan to repeal Obamacare and institute the solution Ward has produced entitled the “Patient Power Plan.”
Ward began describing:
This plan and the other new, fresh bold ideas that I will be proposing during this campaign are something that sets me apart from Senator McCain because you haven’t seen too many new ideas coming out of his office and out of his mind. He’s been in Washington D.C. for over 30 years and if he needs six more years to accomplish something, I’m wondering what it is.
As a physician, I have seen the good the bad and the ugly of Obamacare and I used to say there was some good, but it’s very, very difficult to find any good here on the ground in Arizona, here in the trenches in the emergency department where I work because premiums and deductibles are way up and the emergency rooms are overwhelmed. And so, we see a lot of bad and a lot of ugly every single time that we work.
So this Patient Power Plan, what it does is it fully repeals Obamacare. It must. And it repeals all of the taxes and all of the regulations that go along with it, which is going to save our country billions of dollars. And then the other good part about this plan is that it puts the power back where it belongs, it takes it out of the hands of the politicians, of the bureaucrats of the insurance companies and it puts it straight back into the hands of the patient. We don’t see any of that under Obamacare.
This Patient Power Plan allows people and encourages people to have a health savings account no matter what their income level is and it completely levels the field so that the poorest of the poor are able to have the best healthcare because they have, they’re injected into the free market of medicine as well as the middle class and the rich. And their health savings account, that is something that takes care of the things that are day-to-day needs. Whether its, you need to go to the store to buy cough medicine or ya know you have a cold or a rash or your back hurts and you go into doctor’s office, not the emergency room, into the doctor’s office and you use that health savings account to pay for those visits. And then you have a catastrophic care policy, we call it a major medical policy that covers the true emergencies, the things like car accidents, cancer, pregnancy, long-term debilitating very costly illnesses, all of those are taken care of by true insurance. What we have right now in the insurance company world, in the health insurance company world, is not true insurance. Whenever you buy car insurance, you hope not to use it. When you buy life insurance you hope to heck not to use it, at least not for a really, really long time. But people have health insurance and they say, hey I’ve got health insurance, it’s already paid up, I’ll go get that MRI or I’ll go get this procedure that I may not need because someone else is paying for the bulk of it. So we’ve got to get some free market back into the health care arena if we want to truly get the healthcare that we want and need rather than having to settle for what the government is willing to give us.
Boyle reminded the listening audience that Ward raised over half a million dollars in the most recent fundraising report, her first quarter report. Only Senator Cruz appears to have beaten Ward in first quarter fundraising among Republican Senate candidates, at least in recent history.
Ward recounted highlights of a recent three day trip to Washington D.C. to introduce herself as an alternative to McCain. “I think this trip has opened the eyes to a lot of people. I gained a lot of conservative support during the trip and I hope to get more.”
We’re going to need the momentum, the momentum of the groups, the momentum of the grassroots, the momentum of the country if we truly want to retire one of the big D.C. dinosaurs that are there. That are stopping things from going down the right path.
Senator McCain has “been an obstacle not to the Democrats, not President Obama’s agenda, but to conservative policies that are designed to shrink the size of government and get the federal government out of our way. He’s putting obstacles in the way of people and it’s gotta stop.”
Ward replied to Boyle’s question about the TPP, calling the process executed to push the bill deal through “un-American,” in part for the lack of transparency. She referenced the Senate’s abdication of authority on the matter as of last April and that the deal should be treated like the treaty that it is. Ward reiterated, “Government in secret is not the American way.”
State Senator Kelli Ward’s Patient Power Plan to repeal Obamacare and provide a patient-centric plan can be found on her website KelliWard.com.
Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana
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