Kind faces a challenge from the left in congressional primary
Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District faces a challenge in the Aug. 11 Democratic primary from a candidate who says the incumbent hasn’t done enough to embrace a more progressive liberal agenda.
And in that district, which Donald Trump carried in 2016, two Republicans are facing off in the primary to try to move the district to the GOP column in the general election.
Kind’s challenger, Mark Neumann, criticizes the incumbent for not embracing the Medicare for All plan championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and for being part of the status quo in Washington. (Neumann is not the Republican Mark Neumann who was Wisconsin’s 1st District congressional representative in the 1990s.)
Kind, 57, is from La Crosse and was first elected to Congress in 1997. He serves on the Ways and Means Committee, which focuses on tax law writing. In December, he voted along with most of his party to impeach President Donald Trump.
Neumann, 66, is originally from Illinois (his wife is from Wisconsin) and spent 20 years as a Franciscan brother — including six years abroad in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and decades as a pediatrician.
He chose to run, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, because of issues on which he deeply disagrees with Kind.
“At a certain point, you say: ‘Well, if you can’t convince the leadership in our government to take seriously some of your concerns, then it’s time to offer an alternative leadership,’” he said.
On health care, Kind, a member of the Health subcommittee in the House, told the Journal Sentinel that he supports the Affordable Care Act, as opposed to overhauls like the proposed single-payer “Medicare for All” system.
“We (in Wisconsin) live in one of the lowest Medicare reimbursement areas of the entire country, and unfortunately, most of the single-payer, Medicare for All programs would lock in those reimbursement rates,” he said.
Neumann supports Medicare for All, citing the bill introduced in the House last year.
It would exclude privately held insurance companies, which Neumann said “are taking a profit out of the (current) system and making (health care) way more expensive than it needs to be.”
Republican primary
Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District was carried by Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.
Derrick Van Orden, 51, of Hager City, said he decided to run in the Republican primary after Kind voted to impeach President Trump.
Van Orden wrote on his website that he grew up in “rural poverty” and enlisted in the Navy at 18, eventually serving as a Navy SEAL senior chief around the world.
Jessi Ebben, from Eau Claire, writes on her website that she decided to run because she disapproved of how the hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation were handled, the delay in passing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade, and the president’s impeachment last year.
Ebben works in public relations for Prevea Health, and wrote her recent work “has revolved around helping rural clinics respond to the COVID-19 crisis.”
Van Orden did not respond to an interview request from the Journal Sentinel, while Ebben was unable to schedule one in time for publication.
Regarding health care, Van Orden supports removing “the last vestiges of the disastrous Obama Care“(the Affordable Care Act), according to his website, and also wants the price of prescription drugs to be lowered.
Ebben wrote that she supports “encouraging generic, affordable versions of many prescription drugs” in order to lower health care costs and that broadband internet service for telemedicine should be improved in rural areas.