Senate hopeful Coats hears from health care providers

By Michael Gonzalez

CROWN POINT — U.S. Senate candidate Dan Coats listened to a laundry list of concerns, worries and a sprinkling of “fixes” from health care professionals at Saint Anthony Medical Center during a campaign stop Wednesday.

Coats last month won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democrat. Coats will face U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth on the November ballot.

Coats, a Republican who served in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 1999, did not hold back on criticizing the health care bill passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama this year.

“I came here to listen and learn from the people who deal with this every day what the impact is of the legislation that has passed,” Coats said. “There is great pessimism that Obamacare is going to make the situation better.”

It’s not that health care didn’t need reform, Coats said. He noted rising costs and problems with giving more people access to quality care. But bundling it all together in a massive law instead of addressing health care issues incrementally is a prescription for disaster, he said.

“The idea that you can take a sixth of the national economy and put it into a single piece of legislation is incomprehensible,” Coats said. “There are not enough offices in Washington to hold the people to manage this thing.”

Doctors at the meeting expressed concern about the future of their profession under the health care bill.

“If we continue down this road, 20 to 30 years from now, I think where we’ll see a big drop in the quality in the high school students who aren’t going to want to go into medicine,” said Dr. Ryan Cmejrek. “You’re going to get the C students who say, ‘Hey, I can’t get into finance, so let’s try this medicine thing as a fallback.’”

Dr. Troy Stovall spoke at length of his own path to medicine and worried salaries for doctors will drop without a corresponding decline in student debt.

“And having that debt strapped on to you doesn’t make for a content life,” he said.

Hospital President David Ruskowski said the government should encourage people to make better lifestyle decisions for their own health.

“Personal responsibility is something we have to get our arms around and the government has to help us with incentives for a healthy lifestyle,” he said.

“We’re seeing increasing incidents of second lung transplants because of patients who continued smoking after the first one.”