Jennifer Neahring: Campaign Update

"I'm running because we couldn't just keep doing the same thing. I was unhappy enough with Walden to quit my job to run for Congress.  I couldn't just sit back."

Dr. Jennifer Neahring

Dr. Neahring broadens her portfolio of interests.  She got into this because she wanted to fix health policy.  Now she wants to fix a lot of things.

Last year Jennifer Nearing had been talking with thought leaders at Harvard and DC, and she felt a calling.  She could help fix a broken health care system, and because she could do it she must do it.

She spoke with members of our Congressional Delegation. Could someone with a physician's perspective--someone keenly interested in health policy--make a difference?  Could a physician actually win in the 2nd CD?  They encouraged her.  She jumped into the race.

Jennifer Neahring is an example of one happy version of the American success story: the high achieving, mixed-race, 2nd generation immigrant.  She had smarts, a great work ethic, a can-do attitude, and America rewarded it. She isn't done.  She wants to do more, achieve higher, make a difference in America. 

She met with ten people in my home on December 5, 2017, four months ago, and impressed them with her sense of mission to fix a broken health care system. The question was her electability. She was all about policy; elections are about connection to a constituency. She was accustomed to success and work being rewarded, but 2nd Congressional District residents voted 60% for Trump who spoke to the frustrations and disappointments of white Americans. Trump connected with rural America. He said the present was carnage.  He said experts and urbanites and racial outsiders were stepping in front of regular American, grabbing the success that had been theirs.  His message was one of resentment.  Nearing communicated optimism and opportunity.

It might not be a good fit, I thought.

That was then. She is a much better candidate now, with more issues to discuss.  She is talking about infrastructure, the electrical grid, rural broadband, and shoring up Social Security by significantly raising the income cap on the Social Security tax.

She still projects optimism and opportunity.

She is one of seven candidates. She is settling into a niche on the political spectrum--somewhere to the right of Eric Burnett who has claimed the unabashedly Bernie-style leftist union orientation.  She is content that Tim White--and not herself--gets applause from audiences for angry denunciations of Walden. "That's just not me."  

She recognizes that Jamie McLeod Skinner connects with some people with her ranch talk and belt buckle, but that isn't her, either.  She wears what she wore as a physician in practice in rural Iowa and again in Salem: either a dress or khaki pants and a shirt.  She said she only wore the white doctor's jacket for her website photo, so she would be identified as the one who was a doctor. "I had to go out and buy one.  I didn't own one."

She said she thought being exactly who she was--a physician--was a good way to connect with the district.  Doctors are needed and respected in rural counties, and people expect doctors to know things. "Doctors care.  Doctors connect with individual patients."   Doctors belong in rural counties just like ranchers do, she says.

Knowing things creates a problem for Neahring.  In forums people ask the candidates to announce what they propose for solving the health care problem.  The response that gets applause is one that is simple to understand and state:  "Medicare for All."  

She doesn't say it.  Fellow candidates notice and want that apostasy noted.  

Nearing says that that solution is over-simple, it misunderstands that some 15% of Medicare patients are also Medicaid eligible, and that Medicare itself must be fixed before it can be expanded.  Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices, Medicare is fee-for-service instead of whole-body-wraparound. Medicare is "rescue care", treating illness, rather than promoting wellness. Until Medicare is fixed it is the wrong model. We need to get to universal coverage, but some form of Medicare for everyone is the end, not the route, she said.  She took ten minutes to explain what needed to happen, and I may not have summarized it correctly, but it is my understanding of what she said, which, of course, exemplifies the problem.  Its complexity is both Neahring's strength and political weakness.  


Trump said, "Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?"  

Jennifer Neahring did.

Neahring thinks the congressional race is settling into a contest between two women, herself and Jamie McLeod-Skinner. There is no polling. 

 It is the year of the woman, she said. "Jamie got in early and built an organization early. And she has deep residency roots." Nearing thinks that her own big asset is her deep knowledge of the subject matter of a signature betrayal by Greg Walden, his risk to health care for hundreds of thousands of his own constituents.  Repeal and replacement of the ACA would have reversed the expansion of the Oregon Health Plan, risked access to insurance for people with pre-existing conditions, and it would have damaged rural hospitals in his district.

She says she is making that case, and trying to do it as someone who brings people together, not as someone who calls Walden "a liar", which she says is Tim White's task.  Can a soft tone and a complex approach to a complex problem cut through the clutter and campaign talk of six other candidates? That is her task.


[This is a second in a series of profiles on each of the candidates.  Jim Crary's was the day before yesterday.  There are more to come.

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