Kai Risdahl

She's an art teacher in our local school district, and she's younger than I am.

But I have health insurance through our company as provided, but I'm one of the owners.

And, you know, we pay 100% of our insurance.

So we go from, you know, paying a couple hundred dollars a month through my wife to paying, you know, $1,300 to $1,800 a month, just in premiums.

So I do look at that and it's like, when can I afford to retire?

I got to make sure I have health insurance.

And I hear that every day from all my patients, even like, well, I want to retire, but I don't have health insurance if I retire.

It all seems to be centered around health care and health insurance.

Why do you think this issue of health care in the United States and look, your guy has been doing this for 35 years and you're a practitioner, right?

You're not a policy guy, but you know what you're talking about.

Why isn't this higher on the list of things that our elected leaders care about?

That's a good question.

I think they care about it, but I don't think anyone has a good answer for it.

I also do believe that a lot of our politicians, at least in Washington, are out of touch because they have top notch insurance and health care.

If they had to receive the same insurance their constituents get, I do believe they might see it differently and maybe act differently.

And then stepping back and looking at just recently with the subsidy cuts and everything, that's still a very small percentage of the population in our country that gets their insurance through the marketplace.

It's like 7%, 10%.

They have $8,000, $10,000, $20,000 deductibles.

So even though they have insurance, they don't have insurance for day-to-day needs.

But our legislators, I don't know.