 |
| Biden toured Floyd Valley Healthcare in LeMars, Iowa, in July 2019. (Photo by Tim Hynds, Sioux City Journal) |
Democrats have forgotten rural Americans, and that’s part of the reason they voted against them last month. President-elect Joe Biden told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
The topic came up as Biden discussed industrial policy and trade, sensitive subjects in many rural areas.
“I want to make sure we’re going to fight like hell by investing in America first,” Biden said, mentioning energy, biotech, advanced materials and artificial intelligence as areas needing big government investment in research.
“I’m not going to enter any new trade agreement with anybody until we have made major investments here at home and in our workers,” and in education, he told Friedman.
The columnist paraphrased Biden: “And this time, he insisted, rural America will not be left behind. There is no way Democrats can go another four years and lose almost every rural county in America. For their sake and the country’s, Democrats have to figure out what is going on there and speak to rural voters more effectively.”
And then he quoted the president-elect directly: “You know, it really does go to the issue of dignity, how you treat people. I think they just feel forgotten. I think we forgot them.”
“I respect them,” Biden added, and indicated that he plans to prove it by going after the novel coronavirus and effectively distributing vaccines in “red and blue areas alike.”
Noting that he visited 15 rural hospitals and the trouble they have staying open, Biden said the federal government can “end the rural health care crisis right now by building on Obamacare, assuming it survives at all, with a public option [and] automatically enroll people eligible for Medicaid. There’s strong support for that — and particularly [from] people in rural states, like Texas and North Carolina, that reject expansion. We can boost funding. . . . The biggest problem is there’s not enough reimbursement for them to be able to keep open.”
He told Friedman that many rural hospitals and clinics that could benefit from telemedicine lack broadband connectivity. “We should be spending $20 billion to put broadband across the board,” he said. “We have got to rebuild the middle class,” but “especially in rural America.”
