There are currently three Republicans seeking their party’s nomination to challenge incumbent U.S. Rep. Jared Golden in this November’s 2nd District Congressional contest.
As part of ourYour Vote 2020 election coverage, Maine Public is asking each of them about the issues that pollsters have identified as being most important to Republican voters.
Senior Political Correspondent Mal Leary spoke with former state Rep. Dale Crafts about health care, the opioid crisis and, of most concern to Republicans, taxes and spending.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Crafts: I remember way back when I first got into politics or started thinking about that. When I was in high school, Ronald Reagan came on the scene and did the biggest tax cut that we’d ever seen and stimulated the economy, like the world hadn’t ever seen, and it caused a worldwide boom. And we see America’s economy now is quite incredible.
Leary: But how do you accomplish that goal? Which taxes do you target to lower and what spending do you target to cut? Because it’s gotta balance there somewhere.
I served in Augusta eight years. And this is a really tiny budget compared to the federal government. And government doesn’t run very efficient. I couldn’t run my business like that. People are not looking for the pennies to save the dollars. In business you do that because you’ve gotta make a bottom line or you go out of business. There’s not a revenue problem, there’s a spending problem. So I would certainly try to bring in principles to try and make government run more efficient. But on the other hand, certainly, if you grow the economy, you grow more revenue. Certainly we want to keep a strong military. If you look at the Trump era so far, the average wages increased almost $7,000. And so when that happens, people are paying more taxes. When you pay more taxes, you have more revenue. You have more revenue, we certainly got to get this spending under control because even with Trump and all that he’s doing, it’s a trillion dollar deficit in the budget. Nevermind the $23 trillion that we have. So spending’s out of control.
Not far behind, though, in terms of the issue of taxes and spending is affordable health care — quality, affordable health care I think is the way most people were phrasing it in the poll response. How do you achieve that goal? Because that is an expensive proposition, no matter which plan that you talk about. There’s all kinds of them out there.
Well, I certainly don’t want to see some of the proposals from the Democratic candidates where they just want to go with socialized medicine, and eliminate 180 million people in the country that have private health insurance that I’d say they’re satisfied with. Certainly there’s huge deductibles, and even with that it’s pretty tough to be affordable for anybody. But again, I’m a free market guy. And I know in business, the more competition you can create, the more prices come down and the quality goes up. If I don’t give that service, my competitor will. So in that field, I don’t know why that can’t take place. Now, we need more doctors, more nurses. You know, there’s a shortage of that, which is not causing the competition like it should to bring prices down. You know, the president’s got another proposal to have hospitals be more transparent with the cost of procedures. Now, they say that list is out there, I remember working on that up here trying to get some of that done. And what’s happening is there’s kind of like two different prices. You have the posted price, but then you have the price of where they negotiate with the insurance company, which is a different price. So the president is trying to get the truth out there on that. I know people have told me that they’ll go to get an MRI done, and it could be $1,600 at one hospital and $1,100 another one, but people don’t know that. I’ll tell you, I’m a big proponent of preventive care.
Sort of a subset of that issue, but one that’s very much on Mainers minds, is the opioid crisis. I don’t think there’s one of us anywhere in the state who doesn’t know somebody who has been affected by this — a mother, father, son, daughter, cousin, aunt. What should the role of the federal government be to try to deal with this crisis?
Well, again, we talked a little bit about federal government being part of the regulation of it, and we got the FDA and some of the stuff that gets approved — it amazes me sometimes on these boards that we have, like the FDA, that all the “experts” that are on the boards are actually people that are part of the problem. They’re from pharmaceuticals. They sit on these boards because they are the “experts.” And I think there’s a big conflict of interest there. How did we ever get to this place where something so addictive — I watched a news report last night on TV that 30% of the people that go on taking painkillers for injuries end up addiciting — how did that ever get approved? So again, as we grow the economy, create more revenue, invest in more research and development to come up with a painkiller that is not addictive, that is very effective, that’s really the place that the government needs to focus on. And in my opinion, that drug needs to go away. But we need to find alternatives because there are people in severe pain.
That takes care of kind of the preventative side of it, but how do you deal with all those people who become addicted? That’s one of the big issues that we’ve seen here in Maine, is there’s not enough facilities to treat them.
There’s not. I can tell you that I was up to Machias, there’s a drug rehab place up there. I was up there when state Sen. Garrett Mason was running for governor. And some of these Christian or faith-based ones, the success rates are up like in the 70% areas, and some of the government programs are only like 12% or 17% success rate of people getting off the drug. So we need to be open to look at ways to help these other people, because a lot of it is they’re not funded federally at all, and it’s people more in the ministry that are offering these things. Maybe we can look into that a little further, because we got to get people to get the help. We can’t arrest people or put people away. We need to rehabilitate people and get them back to society where they can be productive in life.
Originally published March 10, 2020 at 4:37 p.m. ET.
