I believe Healthcare begins with personal responsibility.

Recently, the current administration is leaning towards requiring a menu of care costs. This act obligates the healthcare establishments to list the costs of products and services rendered. In every other transactional scenario, the consumer is made aware of his/her financial responsibility of every other product cost or service fee, from the food and beverage industry to the production industry, why as consumers regarding health, is that information not readily available? Your health is personal until you enter into the Healthcare industry. You then become the product on an assembly line without a guaranteed inspection stamp. The consumer has the right to know the cost of goods and services. I believe you have the right to know and pay for only the services your needs required.

Healthcare has tried to stamp the individual as defective, thus eluding accountability, increasing the rise in the opioid epidemic plaguing America. However, the individual is not flawed but rather the healthcare industry. By empowering the patient-consumer with options, costs, and multiple resources to choose from, the industry then is the one receiving the inspections stamp based upon the wellness of the community served. The consumer’s quality of health must drive the health industry for us to have a healthy society. The pharmaceutical industry cannot be allowed to pigeonhole the consumer or the healthcare establishments into promoting the latest vaccination, remedy pill, or injection as the only options available as a “one size fits all.”

As a nation, we are fighting an opioid epidemic as more than 24 million are addicted to the band-aide pharmaceutical drugs, missing the root of the issue. By allowing corporations to prioritize the band-aide and not the patient, this type of focus creates a crippled society. When we increase private organizations to share in the healing process, we then strengthen our community as a whole.

Since the implementation of the Health Care Act, insurance is less affordable, and healthcare providers less available. Americans and North Carolinians have bought, without questions asked, a prescription of damaged goods, a fractured system, filled with broken promises the citizens have bought without reading the terms and agreements.

Though I believe in private healthcare and private conversations between doctor and patient, arriving at a solution best for the individual patient, I respect ALL life. I believe in the freedom of choice unless that choice causes harm or directly impacts another’s life. I will stand now and in the General Assembly for the Life of the Unborn.