I also interviewed Democratic Representative David Watkins who is also a doctor. He said that something needs to be done about healthcare costs because there is a large number of people in poverty especially in the Eastern Kentucky area which causes there to be a lot of people on Medicaid and also a large uninsured group. What he seen as the largest group of people on Medicaid were young women who get pregnant out of wedlock and at a young age. He said that his son Henry is an OBGYN and around 40% of the young unmarried women that come into his clinic are on Medicaid. He said that these women have no way to support themselves and no benefits so Medicaid or no insurance are the only two options.

Rep Watkins had a different view of National Healthcare than Rep DeWeese did; he thought that it would be a good thing because it would eliminate the insurance companies who take 20-25% of the money for healthcare. Right now he said that Medicaid only receives 3-4% of the money and creating a single-payer system would allow more money to help with Medicaid. The KHA is supportive of National healthcare because to them there wouldn’t be much difference because 50-70% of people who attend the hospital are already on Medicaid or Medicare therefore there would not be that great of a change. The only thing that they are not supportive of is government control of hospitals under a National Healthcare system.

I asked Rep. Watkins what he thought about the managed healthcare system and he said that he thought it was fairly good because it addresses the issue of prevention instead of treatment but he didn’t like that instead of saving money it tended to cost more in the implementation process. He said that prevention is half as costly as treatment because it stops the patient from waiting until they illness gets worse and they have to enter the emergency room which costs more. He said that in other countries because they focus on prevention instead of treatment they pay out about $3000 unlike the United States who pays around $6,000 per patient.

            Lastly Rep Watkins and I took a look at some of the bills he had been working on in the session, and how they related to Medicaid and improvement of health insurance for individuals. His major piece of legislation was the Cigarette tax. He talked about a woman he had treated at his concurrence clinic which is a free clinic that he and his son takes care of. The woman ended up costing them and the hospital $15000-$20000 because she was not insured and she had clogged up an artery in her neck because of smoking and required an emergency treatment. He said that together her and her husband spent $4600 annually on cigarettes, money that could have been spent on insurance. Rep Watkins said that increasing the cigarette tax would decrease smoking therefore decreasing the number of patients attending the emergency room because of smoking-related illnesses (Watkins 2008).