Healthcare isn't just an abstract political debate; it’s a crisis hitting Utah families right at the kitchen table. Too many politicians downplay the reality, pretending that going without insurance is a choice made only by people who don't know any better. The truth is it is rapidly becoming the reality for middle-class Americans.

In 2017, after our insurance company hit us with yet another 26% premium hike, my wife and I faced an impossible choice: pay the mortgage or keep our health insurance. You can’t eat health insurance, you can’t wear it, and you can’t sleep under it. So having no other choice, we dropped it. We opted to put money aside each month to cover our own care, but for millions of families, even that isn't an option.

The United States is the only developed nation where corporate profits take precedence over human lives. It is morally wrong. When a single broken ankle can cause lifelong financial ruin, the system is fundamentally broken.

I will do everything in my power to push for Universal Healthcare and cut out the greedy middlemen. We do not need for-profit health care insurance companies, artificially inflated prescription prices, and layers of corporate administrators taking a cut. We need a simplified system managed at the state level since healthcare costs vary by region with a lean federal framework to handle interstate care.

Instead of forcing businesses to pay skyrocketing private premiums, we can fund this through a baseline payroll tax, significantly lowering the overhead for employers. Furthermore, your auto, homeowners, and workers' compensation premiums will naturally decrease because those policies will no longer have to absorb wrapped-in medical payouts.

As an uninsured American, I live with the daily knowledge that a serious illness like cancer would force my family into a horrific calculation: seek treatment and lose our home or skip care to save my wife and daughter from financial ruin. No American should ever have to choose between bankruptcy and death. It’s time to stop treating healthcare like a luxury and start treating it like a fundamental right.