Issue Description:
Healthcare is bloated, and broken. Corporate consolidation in the healthcare sector has led to massive insurance monopolies buying up local medical practices and pharmacies. This results in skyrocketing premiums, unclear hospital billing practices, and rural health systems that are chronically underfunded and inaccessible. When people need care, they are vulnerable to opaque pricing and corporate consolidation. Too many families are hit with surprise bills, administrative barriers, and unaffordable out-of-pocket costs.
My Stance:
Access to preventative and medical care should be accessible to everyone. Healthcare policy must aggressively dismantle corporate monopolies, enforce absolute price transparency, and prioritize patient outcomes over administrative profits and surprise billing. My family experienced this directly: even with insurance, we faced $35,000 in out-of-pocket bills the year we had our daughter, with no complications.
Solutions:
- Enforce Hospital Price Transparency: Impose severe financial penalties on hospitals and corporate insurers that fail to provide real-time, searchable pricing for medical procedures. Create automatic consumer protections: if a hospital or insurer is not compliant with federal transparency rules, the patient cannot be billed above a standardized benchmark price, and collections actions are prohibited.
- Stop Price Gouging: Broaden the $35 insulin cap and the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket maximum to apply universally to all Americans, ending the practice of pharmaceutical price gouging.
- Market Competition via Public Option: Introduce an efficient, government-backed insurance plan on the ACA exchange to force private monopolies to stop exploiting government funding for record profits and lower their premiums in order to compete for your business.
- Mental Health Parity: Require every federally regulated health plan to cover mental health and addiction care on the same terms as physical health: same copays, same networks, and the same prior-authorization rules.
- Telehealth Expansion: Deploy targeted federal grants to build mobile clinics and robust telehealth infrastructure in South Carolina’s underserved rural communities.
- Monopoly Busting: Advance bipartisan antitrust enforcement to prevent vertically integrated chains from controlling supply, squeezing independent providers, and driving up prices for patients.
