Annette Bosworth – Candidate Running to Stop Big Government, Health Care

Note: This is the second of two articles profiling Dr. Annette Bosworth, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.

SIOUX FALLS (NPN) – Dr. Annette Bosworth, Republican U.S. Senate candidate, does not like big government. And she doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act, aka, “Obamacare,” very much either.

“Now we’ve just added a bill with 159 new policemen. We have 159 policemen in the exam room telling me I’m doing it right,” Bosworth says. “There’s that many new regulatory boards in Obamacare.”

Obamacare makes a bad national health care situation worse, according to Bosworth.

But it isn’t just big government that the internal medicine practitioner thinks is the problem. It’s also big health care.

“They are a product of our health care culture. They are the pack, that’s how groupthinkbegins,” she says about Rapid City Regional, Avera and Sanford. “They’re oligopolies.”

Later she adds, “I don’t think it’s an accident, that as physicians become more and more employees in the state of S.D., you see their satisfaction numbers decline, their independence lost, their voice of how health care should be run is muted.”

Bosworth, 41, runs her own independent clinic—Meaningful Medicine—in south Sioux Falls.

Bosworth fears that patients will lose the personal touch when seeking treatment, something that is already being lost under the current system and that Obamacare will accelerate.

She adds that one of the reasons patients like chiropractors is that they take the time to actually know their patients.

“They have relationships that matter. They don’t do 7 minute visits. They touch them,” Bosworth said.

When asked about the satisfaction rates of citizens from other countries with so-called “socialized medicine” compared to the private, insurance-based system in the United States, Bosworth has an answer for that too.

First, private medicine, she says, is more innovative. More importantly, Bosworth says socialized medicine is what the Brits, Germans, Canadians and others are used to. She says they expect to wait months to see a specialist. If a foreigner experienced Americanmedicine, troubled as it is, she says they’d have a much different opinion about their home country’s care.

But health care isn’t her only issue.

Bosworth grew up on a hog farm near Plankinton. She has some definite thoughts on the Farm Bill now before Congress, such as decoupling the farm program from food aid.

“I wouldn’t call a farm bill a farm bill unless it really was just talking about the Farm Bill,” she said. “Call it something else.”

The decoupling of the food aid through programs like SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—the old food stamps program—is important if the United States is to stop citizen dependency on the government. She cites an example from her own practice about a patient who has been on disability since high school—but still able to do some sort of work.

“Her disability stayed, she did not stay disabled. Her payments just stayed. She never finished high school,” Bosworth said. “She continued to claim that disability despite it not being alive and real for her and she used it for complete medical care, complete housing, complete food subsidies,” Bosworth notes. “She now has three children in their teen years. The only way they know is to have watched mom.”

She says federal and state social welfare programs concentrate too much on the number of people who receive services rather than outcomes. She says there’s a better metric.

“How good of an American did we make?” she suggests. “Find a solution that get’s you out of it (dependency).”

Big government, she says, causes many problems throughout society.

“The centralization is the enemy,” Bosworth says. It leads to socialism and a lack of innovation, she adds.

“We have a federal responsibility to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves,” Bosworth emphasizes. “We do not have a responsibility to take care of the whole bloody nation.”

Bosworth is one of four Republican candidates running for their party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2014. Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Johnson is stepping down from his seat after serving two six year terms. The other Republicans in the race are former Gov. Mike Rounds, state Rep. Stace Nelson and state Sen. Larry Rhoden.

On the Democratic side, former FEMA regional director Rick Weiland is running while former state Sen. Ron Volesky is contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate.

The primary for the spots is June 3, 2014.