Health care, coronavirus response divide candidates for 4th Congressional District
Health care in the midst of a pandemic and how to heal a battered economy are among the main issues dividing the candidates for Congress in the Wichita-centered Kansas 4th District.
The race matches Republican incumbent Ron Estes, a former state and Sedgwick County treasurer, against Democratic challenger Laura Lombard, who runs an international trade consulting firm.
Lombard, a 2018 candidate, said she hadn’t planned on running for Congress again this year because she has a 1-year-old son to take care of. But she decided to enter the race when no other prominent Democrats came forward, she said.
“I think we all recognize that the country is kind of at this crossroads,” Lombard said. “This wasn’t the year to sit out.”
She said her son’s future is what motivates her campaign.
“For me as a mom, I’m looking ahead and thinking ‘are we going to have a democracy if we don’t really fight for it?’” she said. “After this coming election, what’s our economy going to look like, what are the opportunities for our children going to be in future years and decades? It’s a scary thought.”
Estes said he originally ran for Congress because as state treasurer, he was part of an association of treasurers that shared best practices on esoteric topics such as cash management, common savings programs and pensions.
Over time, that changed, he said.
“The last few years, it was more “How do we focus on keeping bad legislation from being passed at the federal level or bad regulation coming out from one of the agencies?” he said.
His current focus is on “How do we make sure that people have jobs and opportunities to care for themselves and their families?” he said. “I want to continue that, whether it’s for our farmers and ranchers here in south-central Kansas or aviation manufacturing companies as well as the hospitals and schools.”
Coronavirus concerns
Like all elections this year, the 4th District race is taking place in the long shadow of the coronavirus pandemic and health care is a major campaign issue.
Estes lauds Washington’s response to COVID-19.
“I think the federal government did an outstanding job earlier this year,” he said. “When we came together we funded programs like developing additional treatments, developing vaccines, providing paid leave, providing additional unemployment insurance, providing the Paycheck Protection Program, which was a phenomenal program, getting the stimulus checks out so people who had extra expenses could have more money in their pockets, whether they lost their job or whether they kept their job.”
He does not support a nationwide mask mandate, or even a Kansas one.
“A statewide mandate didn’t make sense because there’s differences in Sedgwick County and in Johnson County, and Kiowa County or Elk County or Chatauqua in terms of the issue that they’re dealing with.”
He said business closures near the start of the emergency were originally intended to relieve pressure on hospitals and their intensive care units. He said that’s been largely accomplished and those actions were never intended to “eliminate the virus and make sure nobody ever gets sick.”
“Now, for some reason, it’s morphed into ‘This is the way we’re going to get rid of the virus’ and that’s proven not to be the case,” he said. “Whichever state you’re in, and different states have done different approaches, they’re still having people who are continuing to get sick, and we will until either everyone’s been vaccinated or everybody has had it and recovered.”
For now, “We should have as an expectation that people are going to get sick from the coronavirus, just like they will get sick from the flu and from colds and from other things,” he said.
Lombard disagrees with Estes on masks, saying she would like to see “some type of mask mandate coming out of Washington.”
She said it doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, but could be triggered by the actual prevalence of coronavirus infection in a given community.
She rates Washington’s response to the pandemic as poor and blames lack of leadership by President Donald Trump.
She said the approximately 215,000 American deaths so far from the pandemic is “just not acceptable.”
“It’s got to be a much more coherent plan coming from Washington,” Lombard said.
“The Trump Administration purposely downplayed the severity of the virus; the messaging around the virus has been erratic and often harmful to ensuring a robust public health strategy,” she said. “Other countries have contained the virus to levels where they can go back to normal activities. There continues to be a roadmap to containing the virus if we choose to take it.”
Universal health care
The pandemic has also revived the longstanding debate over the nation’s health-care system.
Estes is a strong advocate of repealing the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare” after the former president who spearheaded its approval.
Estes says it “broke the health care system that was working for most people while trying to fix a problem that affected a small percentage of health care consumers.”
He said he prefers using competition to keep prices down.
“We need to allow the free market and private sector to do what they do best by removing burdensome and expensive regulations,” he said.
He indicated he would favor keeping the ACA’s ban on denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Lombard said the pandemic highlights the need for universal health care coverage. She said the ACA is not a perfect solution but better than nothing.
She doesn’t support the so-called Medicare for All plan propelled by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party, favoring instead the more incremental approach advocated by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Biden supports a plan called “public option” which would offer a government-sponsored health care plan as a voluntary alternative to private insurance.
While the goal is universal coverage, “I am OK with the idea of having a public option to help get us there,” Lombard said. “It doesn’t have to be a big jump.”
Lombard said it’s intolerable to have health care tied to employment in a time when workers are being laid off and furloughed because of business shutdowns and furloughs spawned by COVID-19 restrictions.
“We’ve got to decouple health insurance from employment,” Lombard said. “Millions and millions of people have lost their insurance this year. And that just can’t stand in a year like this — any year — but particularly when we’re in the middle of a pandemic.”
Economic recovery
The two candidates also offer different solutions to getting the economy, especially Wichita’s all-important aviation sector, moving again.
Wichita’s aircraft plants have been hard-hit by the decline in air travel and plane buying spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic, which came on the heels of production slowdowns on the troubled Boeing 737 Max jetliner, which remains grounded after two deadly crashes overseas.
In response, Estes is one of the sponsors of a bill to help aviation manufacturers and suppliers avert further layoffs.
Under the bill, companies envisioning layoffs of 25 percent or more of their workforce would be eligible to apply for federal aid to pay half the salaries of their at-risk workers for up to a year.
Lombard’s she’s a strong supporter of the “Moving Forward Act,” a far-ranging bill passed by the House in July that would earmark $1.5 trillion to upgrade the nation’s transportation, school and broadband infrastructure with an eye toward energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction.
She said she wants to see Kansas, and especially the Wichita area, take a leading role in manufacturing as part of that.
She cites the recent example of Spirit AeroSystems, Wichita’s biggest company, which has turned some of its manufacturing muscle toward producing hospital ventilators instead of planes that aren’t selling right now.
The skills common in Wichita’s industrial workforce could be turned toward clean-energy products, she said.
“We know clean energy is one of the strongest growth areas for jobs in this country already and I’d really like to see our district take more advantage of that,” she said. “I’d like us bringing in more manufacturing for solar panels, wind turbines, other types of clean energy and energy efficiency.”
In-person advance voting begins Monday at the Intrust Bank Arena and the election office in the Sedgwick County Historic Courthouse. Election Day is Nov. 3.
