Political watchers will keep an eye on California’s 10th congressional district, as we head to the polls just six days from today. Two years ago, the seat in the San Joaquin Valley flipped from red to blue. Democratic incumbent Josh Harderwill be challenged by Dr. Ted Howze.
Dr. Ted Howze is a large animal veterinarian in the San Joaquin Valley of California. He hopes to bring his experience in agriculture and healthcare to Congress.
“I think it’s important to make sure that we’re represented in Congress by people who are actually involved on a daily basis in agriculture and understand what our producers go through,” Dr. Howze states.
He says that it is important to have safety nets in place for producers, before disasters happen.
According to Dr. Howze, “The solutions that we really have to look at is putting in place programs for if we hit these stops to protect our producers and make sure that we backstop them in times of national emergency, and we watched this drag on for about three months before we really got any help for our producers and it hurt us in agriculture...”
Supporting local food production is another priority for him.
“I think that we really have to do a lot more to protect our markets against these cheap foreign imports, and as we saw with COVID, how important is producing food locally?” he states. “So, that we actually have it, because when you can’t ship products around the world because of a COVID shutdown, we want to make sure we can feed our own citizens first.”
He says that healthcare got him into this congressional race, after he lost his first wife to a treatable heart condition. The experience pushed him to find solutions for a broken healthcare system.
“We have to have a myriad of solutions and one of those things I’ve talked about is block granting Medicaid funds to states and making it the state’s responsibility to pass those funds through to counties,” he states. “So they can provide healthcare, especially in rural areas... especially like our farmers out there that don’t have access to a facility nearby.”
On the campaign trail, he is hearing from people who want better access to hospitals.
He adds, “I was just at a town hall, the other night, in one of our smaller communities on the west side... and they are clamoring for a hospital out there, because if somebody gets hurt in on the farm in the Paterson/Newman area is can be a twenty to thirty minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital and that can be the difference between life and death.”
He says that he prefers a local approach to policy and would push for the federal government to give more authority to states and counties.
For the full interview click HERE.
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