PULSE OF THE VOTER: Residents discuss social issues, immigration and health care

May 27-- May 27--GLASGOW -- Health care and social issues, particularly abortion and same-sex marriage, were among topics of most interest among those posed to a few local residents polled at the Glasgow Public Square recently, but while those two were important, climate change was hands-down the main subject for a trio of 20-somethings visiting from Tennessee.

As part of its Pulse of the Voters series, the Glasgow Daily Times asked people at the Bounty of the Barrens Farmers Market questions about general topics.

"There's so much to say about all of this," said Andy Reece, 42, of Glasgow as he perused the list of topics. "Do you have a day or half a day?"

Health care

Bonnie Wright of Glasgow said in relation to health care that in addressing a lot of problems, we don't take care of the real issue.

"I think we're Band-Aiding the issue. I pay $1,400 a month for insurance [for two]. I think that's ridiculous. No. 1, I'm healthy. I don't go to the hospital. I think that people, instead of taking care of the issue, I think they Band-Aid it, which ends up costing us more, and I think we need to reform it in a totally different way than the way we're going right now," Wright said.

She doesn't know exactly how to reform it, but the one things she said needs to happen, if nothing else, is equal access.

"I think everybody needs to have health care. They don't need to be labeled. It don't need to be, 'You're poor, so we give you this kind of health care. You're rich; you get this kind of health care. I think everybody needs the same health care, regardless, if there is a way to do that," she said.

Reece is a nurse, so health care is "a huge issue," he said.

"I think we can all agree that society would be a better place with healthier people. The affordable care law may not be perfect, but it allows more citizens to access the health care system ...," he said. "People that do not routinely manage their healthcare issues eventually need more resources."

On the issue of pre-existing conditions, he said, "I've been around long enough that before Affordable Care Act became a law, ... people were denied insurance based on any pre-existing conditions, so if you had high blood pressure, you were denied insurance, and that's a huge ordeal. The consequences are that you're not able to afford the prices of receiving coverage (care). You're not able receive the prescriptions that you need to control that high blood pressure."

That, then, "absolutely" escalates the medical problems, he said.

David Gilbert, a 59-year-old of Pritchardsville, said, "I certainly would want everybody to have some type of health care, but I don't know the answer to that. I just know it's important."

Regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he said, "I think it's flawed. It needs to be corrected, but I don't know the answer. I just don't think it does what it's supposed to do."

He said he would not want the requirement of coverage for pre-existing conditions to go away or to see people denied coverage for that reason, "but again I don't know what the trade-off would be to, you know, I don't know who pays for it. That's the problem, right?"

Wright added that the tendency is to wait until after a problem is out of hand before addressing it.

"I think that, like the opioid epidemic. I think they spend so much money on that. They wait till things like that get so bad, and then you have deaths all over the place, and then they want to take care of something, when these pharmaceutical companies are making all kinds of money," she said.

Nicholas Dekker, 28, of Memphis said health care is "an issue where people go bankrupt and die, every single day, even under the ACA."

Change on that front needs "to bring America up to a western European standard of health care, where people don't have to worry about switching jobs or starting a business, taking a risk because they risk losing their health care coverage," he said.

In his view, the nation needs to go to something with a universal health care system or single payor system.

"I think ultimately, that's going to save us ... as a society and take a lot of that financial burden off regular folks who are already paying a small fortune in premiums. I'm a healthy 28-year-old and I pay $200 to 300 a month for health care [insurance]. And I have pretty good insurance because I'm a teacher."

His friend Tait Jensen, 23, of Memphis said, "I think that summarizes it up."

Social issues

This broad category with specific topics within it was of top interest to three of the people interviewed, but for different reasons.

Tina Mills, 51, of Glasgow said she thinks its wrong to have an abortion unless it's a life-or-death issue for the mother.

"Let somebody else adopt it or whatever, if they don't want to keep it," she said.

"I'm for gay marriage. ... I just think that's their business," Mills said.

Her daughter Amy Mills, a future voter at 14 years old now, wasn't present for her mother's interview but was eager to share her views when she learned what was happening.

Amy addressed the same-sex marriage issue.

"I'm 100 percent for it," she said, "because I am bisexual myself. I love it, and I agree with it and I promote it, basically, and I hope that more people are more accepting in the future. ... I like transgender bathrooms, because I feel like everybody needs a bathroom, so it's a really good idea."

To clarify, she was asked whether she meant separate bathrooms were needed for transgender people.

"Whatever they feel their gender is, I feel like they should be able to go into that bathroom. I don't think it needs a separate bathroom. I think it's what they feel who they are, they should be able to go there," Amy said.

Abortion, Amy said, is not "a great idea."

Jensen said he believes abortion is an issue that is developing more of an age divide.

"Certainly there's still that liberal-conservative dichotomy but I think young people, whether conservative or liberal, are tending to see more that women's reproductive rights ought to be prioritized and it ought to be .... Nobody here is saying, 'A woman must get an abortion.' That's never what we're saying. We're simply talking here about the choice, the option, and more importantly the legally sanctioned choices that a woman can make about her own life," Jensen said. "And I think there needs to be a lot more clarity about what this discussion actually consists of, because so often there's misinformation out there, and so often there's just plain ignorance about what is being advocated."

Climate change

Reece said people seem to disagree with the scientific facts of climate change, but he tends to believe the consensus of scientists around the world.

"If you talk to the people in the areas that are highly affected. They are actually seeing this -- coastline areas. I've seen interviews with people in Alaska and they absolutely say that the climate is changing. Their area is getting warmer. The ice caps are melting. If you talk to people around the reef system, the coral reefs are disappearing because of warmer oceans. So, regardless of whether you believe the scientists or not, the eyes on the ground or the feet on the ground are definitely seeing changes. I absolutely believe there's something going on there," he said. "I feel that we live should live more environmentally conscientious."

He said that even if the scientists were wrong about that grander-scale problem, society would benefit either way from making the recommended course corrections.

"We change our lifestyles to help to curb the climate change, we haven't necessarily done anything to be a detriment to ourselves, but we may have altered the course of this climate change to make the world better," Reece said. "I think we could all benefit from driving less and cycling more."

Dekker, Jensen and Austin Young, 23, also of Memphis, were in the area to visit Mammoth Cave National Park. They're all teachers, with Jensen at a high school and the other two at middle schools.

Young kicked off their discussion.

"Climate change is, if not the most important issue to me, it's like, right up there with the most important issues," he said. "It's real and it's having major effects, and it's going to change every aspect of our lives in the future, especially for young people. Older people that might not be here as long, it may not be as much of their concern, but for someone who's 23, that's going to affect my whole life and my children's life as well."

He was asked what needs to happen.

"The only big solution is going to be something like the Green New Deal," he said. "Obviously, that was just a resolution that didn't have a lot of specifics in it, but I think the intent was the right one. We need a total redoing of how we source our energy in this country and how we get rid of waste as well. That looks like converting to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible."

Jensen nodded affirmatively to most of this.

"I would agree that definitely for millennials and Gen Z folks, climate change is the most important issue, because it has to do with literal livelihood, ... the fact of just even perpetuating the species even," Jensen said, with Dekker nodding now. "It's certainly interesting that most, if not all, of the Democratic primary [presidential] candidates currently have some sort of idea about what to do, with regards to climate change."

Some ideas are better than others, he said, but it is a "selling point" for them, "definitely."

"And that will probably take, what I hope, at least, to be a critical role on the debate stage in this 2020 election," he said.

Young said he'd seen that Joe Biden's climate policy top advisor had been the board of a natural gas company.

"And so, when he comes out and he says, 'We need to find a middle ground.' We were saying this on the drive here. We were like, 'What do you mean the middle ground? Do you mean the high ground with muds and you need to find a place to stay dry?'" he said.

Jensen chimed in again: "I agree. We have the benefit of the past now to realize that we did not plan for these sort of effects. We had no idea what would actually happen when we began actually pulling oil from beneath the earth, so I think younger folks are actually able to say, 'We want to actually, genuinely build a better world for ourselves. I think it's something of a different perspective, because now we're thinking much more of, we've seen what the effects can be with a nonsustainable energy paradigm."

Dekker said he agrees with them on climate change.

"At the top of my list would be climate change and then campaign finance. Those are the top two things I'm looking at for candidates for 2020, because I feel like they do go hand in hand. You can't experience a radical change and actually address these type of problems -- climate change has such a strict timeline -- without a radical stripping away of money out of politics. So, I'm not really considering any candidates that don't prioritize that or that are showing through their actions that they're going to maintain sort of the paradigm of have a lot of, especially, corporate backers dictating their policy going forward."

Mueller report/election interference

Wright said she believes Trump was just targeted because "they" don't like him.

"I think if you look at any president, you know, you could find something wrong with anybody. I just, I don't know what bearing that has right now on him being president. What are they trying to accomplish with that? It's been what, two years now?"

Aside from whether Trump was involved, she acknowledges it's been shown that Russia interfered in multiple ways with the 2016 election.

"I do think if they can prove he was in the wrong or someone on his campaign, they should be penalized or go to jail or whatever the consequences of that, but how many years are going to go through and how much money are you going to spend?" Wright asked. "I think that we have to trust in something [electionwise]. Do I think it's rigged? I think there is some .... I think we need to come up with a different way of doing it."

Tina Mills said she's sick of hearing about it.

"I think it's a waste of money. Let's get on with it. Let's go on. Leave Trump alone. He didn't get caught with his hand in the cookie jar," she said.

Immigration

As Gilbert was being so brief with his answers, he was nudged to select a fourth topic.

"Immigration's an issue. This country was created obviously by immigrants, and we need to continue with our immigrants, but it needs to be legal," he said.

The Daily Times asked whether a wall is needed.

"Probably, to make it legal, the legal access, yeah," Gilbert said.

Young's second topic was immigration.

"I think diversity makes our country stronger, and with education and needing diverse perspectives, I don't see why people that want to be part of what we have in America, in the United States, we can't be welcoming to them and that's just really all I feel about that issue," he said. "I think they have a lot to offer us, and we have a lot to offer them. I think that kind of unity is a better way to go about life, and I don't see immigrants as a threat at all."

Guns

Tina Mills was also the only one with anything to say on gun control, but it was her final pick of topics.

"Don't mess with the guns. That's their business, whatever they have," she said. "If they do something wrong, put 'em in jail. If they don't, leave 'em alone."

She does believe background checks are a good thing, including at shows, sales, etc.

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