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Welcome to the midterms: House District 10

House District 10 Calhoun, Humboldt, Pocahontas & western Webster County

Thompson has law experience

Mike Sexton

Jake Thompson

City: Rockwell City

Occupation: Attorney

Education: Law degree and master’s degree from the University of Iowa, Iowa City; bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College; graduate of Rockwell City-Lytton High School

Political experience: None

Jake Thompson

What do you think should be done with the Mediciaid program?

”The privatization has been a disaster. The math doesn’t work out and it was never going to work out. It doesn’t work out even in theory. The theory is taking the money from the state, funneling it through a for-profit corporation and somehow getting services to the vulnerable needy Iowans who are on Medicaid and need it. We’ve seen that that doesn’t work There are all kinds of Medicaid privatization horror stories out there right now.

”They won’t release the numbers to tell us where these savings are supposed to be, and the reason for that is because there aren’t savings. And we know that. Like I said, even in theory, that’s not a system that’s going to work.

”Part of the problem with Mediciad and really health care in general in the state of Iowa is the fact that there isn’t this open market that we’re always told that there is. We’re told that there is this open market. Well, I’m a private payer and I have one option in the state of Iowa. That’s one option. That’s not a marketplace. If there’s nobody else in a marketplace, that’s not a marketplace.

”The privatization of Medicaid needs to be reversed. Fred Hubbell has said Day One, that’s what he’s doing, and I would agree with that. We are just throwing money at this problem right now and it’s not helping Iowans who need it. So that’s the first step – reversing this disastrous privatization.

”The other part of that is that Medicaid, by definition, is taking care of sick people who are unable to pay for their own care. That’s what Medicaid is. So there is no way in theory that you’re going to have a for-profit organization involved in that at all. Poor and sick people do not represent a money-making endeavor.

”Something that falls through the cracks a lot on this is that these are actual lives at stake here. People are suffering under this privatization. ”

What changes, if any, do you think should be made to the master matrix that governs livestock confinements?

”It needs to be totally scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

”Part of the problem with the matrix itself is that the test questions are ridiculous. You get more points for putting in a semi turnaround than you do for mitigating odor. The other part of it is that it applies to massive operations and out-of-state operations the same way that it does to a local farmer putting it up on their own acreage. That’s where I’d like to see the test change, is to actually favor where the actual small farmers are because they’re being pushed out when the market is being flooded by these big companies. the actual small farmers are seeing their prices drop and with the farming economy, with the pressures and stresses on it right now, I am concerned that the actual small farmers will be pushed out.

”I would like to see the system changed so that you get points on the test for, for instance, putting it close to where you live. I think there is a question on that now, but I would like to see it be a larger percentage. The other thing is doing some of these things to mitgate the odor, even something as small as planting trees. There are ways of odor mitigation that are not required to be used.

”The other aspect in that is local control, allowing local control in the hog confinement siting. Part of revising the matrix system is that we do need to allow the board of supervisors in local counties to have control over the siting. And the argument that we’ll have 99 different systems is not really a concern because when you build from town to town you have to comply with building codes, and these are basically building codes. Pretending that just because one county is slightly different than another is a system that’s not going to work is errorenous. It’s not true.

”The problem is the saturation. We have somewhere in the vicinity of 170 confinement sites in Calhoun County. We’re being overwhelmed. The real, honest issue with this is that the matrix is basically a rubber stamp at this point. ”

In 2010, Iowa voters approved a state constitutional amendment which requires that 3/8 of any increase in the sale tax will be set aside for conservation programs. Would you favor raising the sales tax to do that?

”The Iowa voters voted for this. It needs to be done. The people of Iowa spoke. They wanted it. It passed. Do it.”

What would you recommend to improve mental health services?

”We need more beds.

”My Dads’s a corrections officer at the prison in Rockwell City. They’re getting a lot of mental health patients out there that are not getting the care that they need for a wide variety of reasons, one of them being that those guys are prison guards, they’re not mental health professionals. They have something like one hour of mental health training. But that’s where a lot of those patients are ending up right now.

”We do have some beds in the state of Iowa, but we’re ranked 51st in the amount of beds when you include Washington, D.C. It’s unacceptable. It’s not saving any money. It’s using up a lot of resources. You talk to the local law enforcement. A lot of their time, especially in these small towns, is being spent dealing with mental health issues. We’re wasting a lot of resources and we’re not dealing with the problem. They’re still not getting the care they need.

”The simple fact is to have more beds we need to have more locations. Again, we’re throwing resources at this right now, but it’s essentially going into a hole.They’re not getting the care they need. We have to get out ahead of this because it’s not working for anybody.

What would you recommend to improve public education in Iowa?

”It all gets tied back into the budget. The budget shows where the priorities lie. These past two years, the state education system has seen some of the lowest funding levels we’ve seen in decades. The schools came in and asked for a 4 percent (increase in state aid) ideally to expand and keep up. Three percent was what they stated for just maintaining existing operations. And the legislature gave them 1.1 percent. What is so outrageous to me is that they’re calling that adequately funding education.

”They are not adequately funding education so they can give tax cuts to the wealthiest Iowans.

”This all comes back to the economics and the fact that trickle down is a fraud. We’ve known it’s a fraud for 30 years. So giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Iowans and the wealthiest corporations is nothing more than fraud. We need to end these tax giveways. We have a moral obligation to fund education and support the next generation of Iowans.”

Sexton wields his ag background

Mike Sexton

City: Rockwell City

Occupation: Co-owner of Twin Lakes Environmental Services and Real Time Ag; farmer

Education: Associate degree from Iowa Lakes Community College, graduate of Rockwell City High School

Political experience: State representative since 2015, past member of the Rockwell City-Lytton and South Central Calhoun school boards, state senator from 1999 to 2003

What do you think should be done with the Medicaid program?

”First of all, let me say this. In doing all these interviews people ask me, what do you hear about from people? First is IPERS. Second is the matrix. I think in the last three months, I got one email about Medicaid, about the Medicaid situation. So for Mike Sexton in House District 10, whether people have decided I’m not going to bother Mike or it’s no use calling Mike, I don’t know. I don’t hear anything from my constituents. The businesses that deal with the MCOs — I’m not hearing from them. So whether it’s not that big of an issue in rural Iowa and it’s more of an urban issue, because that’s all we see on the TV in the governor’s race, I just don’t hear that much.

”Last year we passed a bill that put in a whole bunch of oversight. We got that put in place. I don’t think we can go backwards. I don’t think we can go back to having the state run it. I think we owe it to this group of people, Medicaid patients and the people that serve them, we owe it to them to make the system work. So I think we’ll go back next year and we’ll refine and do some more things to make it work for those two groups of people.

”But I think we all recognize that the state-run system was full of fraud. I mean I had people tell me stories that I couldn’t believe. We had to do something to get the fraud out of the system. And I think this did it, but we have to continue to work to make it work for those two groups of people.”

Sexton said he wants to implement one standard set of forms to be used with any of the managed care organizations now running the Medicaid system. Each organization has been using different forms.

He added that he also wants health care providers to be paid promptly by managed care organizations.

What changes, if any, do you think should be made to the master matrix that governs livestock confinements?

”I introduced a bill a year ago that gave farmers points for putting in conservation practices because the state doesn’t have enough money to do all these conservation practices. So why don’t we give farmers points in the matrix and then they’ll put in conservation practices for water quality. I still like that idea. It never passed. I couldn’t even get it out of committee.

”I will introduce legislation that creates some type of a committee which will have the same amount of ag people, like a pork producer representative, cattlemen, the Department of Ag, and the same amount of the environmental side and put them together in a committee that can meet six times over the interim and let them hammer out agreed-to changes to the matrix. That would be the industry and the people that are concerned. If they can agree on things and bring that to the legislature, than I think that would be something we should look at. And I would introduce a bill to do that.”

In 2010, Iowa voters approved a state constitutional amendment which requires that 3/8 of any increase in the sales tax will be set aside for conservation programs. Would you favor raising the state sales tax to do that?

”We talked a lot about this last year. In the Republican House, there’s kind of two groups of people. One group says I’ll vote for that penny if it’s tax neutral. So if you’re going to raise sales tax a penny than you need to reduce income tax the same amount or property tax. Somewhere you need to reduce something so that this isn’t a tax increase because you’ve got a lot of Republicans that are not pro-tax. So they will vote for it if it’s tax neutral.

”You’ve got another group over here which are the ag people, which is probably the camp that I’m in, that say I’ll vote for it but we need to change the formula so that more of the money goes to water quality. That’s what a lot of the people are trying to sell this on, is saying oh, all this money is going to go to water quality when in fact very little of it goes to water quality. It goes to bike paths and bike trails and parks and a lot of things that aren’t going to be related to water quality.

”So what I said is I’ll vote for it because by the time it gets to the House floor this group will be happy and this group will be happy. Before that bill gets there, in order to get enough votes, both of those things will have had to have happened. The tax people will have to be happy and the ag group that wants more of it to go to water quality, they’re going to have to be happy. ”

What would you recommend to improve mental health services?

”We had a huge, omnibus mental health bill last year that brought everything down to the regional level to try to keep it local and keep people from having to go a long ways away. That just got enacted. It just started this summer, probably, going into effect. So I think we’ve got to give that time to work out and see how it’s working. That was a big piece of legislation. It was bipartisan. I think it was unanimous on the House floor. So everybody agreed we’ve got to do this. There wasn’t any fighting. It got done.

”So I think we have to see how this bill we passed plays out and just keep trying to figure out what the answer is. ”

What would you recommend to improve public education in Iowa?

”First of all, I’m a guy that says I don’t see where public schools are doing that bad. I was on the school board for 10 years. I was on the Iowa School Board Association Board of Directors for six years.

”Our teachers are the sixth best paid in the country. In Iowa we have made education a priority. Whenever we do a deappropriation bill, you know when we don’t get as much revenue as we thought we were going to get and we’ve got to cut away, we’ve never , since I’ve been in the House, we’ve never taken it from education. We’ve never taken it from K-12. We’ve always held them harmless. And I think that will always continue.

”Now $57 million is what they got this year — 57 million new dollars. So Mr. Hubbell, my opponent, the Democrats will say that’s not enough, it should be $100 million or it should be $150 million or whatever that number is. My question to them always is where do you want to take the money from? If you’re going to give education more, than who gets less? Do you want to take it from the Department of Ag? Do you want to take it from the Department of Natural Resources? Do you want to take it from the DOT?

”Education was only one of the few that got an increase. Almost everybody else in state government got a decrease, but not K-12 funding. When I go to Des Moines and K-12 is one of the few groups that gets new money in a budget that is tough I just think we did the best we could as a legislature.”

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