U.S. Senator Mike Braun, R-Indiana, visited Woodlawn Hospital Thursday to tour the facility.
And healthcare, he said, is among his top four election issues, along with workforce education, high cost of electricity and water and property taxes.
“Those are probably the biggest issues as you age – health care and workforce education,” said Braun. “Half of our budget is K-12, another 15-percent is how we support our post-secondary public universities.”
He said most recently he’s gotten into issues that weren’t even on the horizon such as the high cost of electricity and water.
“Because all the new big companies that want to come into any state that would include data centers – I think there’s one up in LaPorte County that’s coming online – battery companies and chip factories. They take a whole lot of electricity and a whole lot of water and none of our states have been prepared for it.”
Braun noted the population in his home county of Dubois was 27,000 and his hometown of Jasper’s only 8,000 when he was a child. That’s grown to be 18,000 residents in Jasper and 45,000 in the county since then. “We’ve been a lucky one that’s grown in rural,” said Braun.
With 70-75 of Indiana’s 92 counties rural in nature, certain systems, including healthcare, are vital.
“They’re trying to find out how to keep their hospitals open and keep jobs coming to the community,” he said. “I don’t need to be instructed what the issues are. I’ve lived through it. Started a business back in the early 80s in my hometown that was real little for a long time. Grew into regional then a national company, so that kind of economic development every rural county is looking for. Only a handful of them are finding the right mix of probably 70 or 75 counties. The others are still struggling to see what that might be. And that begs the question of economic development, why we don’t do more to help those counties.”
