Healthcare coverage is taking a larger and larger toll on our businesses and our citizens. Small businesses especially find it difficult to keep up with rising premiums. Moreover, it is often the ability to provide this benefit that puts small businesses at a competitive disadvantage when trying to hire top talent. That is why Jackie was proud to support the Governor’s initiative, New Hampshire Health First. This program was specifically designed to allow small businesses to offer a low cost healthcare plan to their employees as well as to emphasize prevention.

Jackie also wants to ensure that every child in our state has adequate healthcare coverage. She believes that this is both a moral imperative and an economic issue. When a child’s quality of life is diminished from a preventable illness or, worse, a child is lost due to a preventable illness we should feel a collective sense of shame. From a purely economic perspective, children who lack healthcare coverage (just as adults who lack healthcare coverage) are often treated in emergency rooms and/or suffer longer term consequences of treatable illnesses, thereby increasing the costs of healthcare for everybody else. For those reasons Jackie enthusiastically supported expanding healthcare coverage to 10,000 more NH children through the highly respected Healthy Kids program.

Jackie has also co-sponsored legislation to provide for coverage of beriatric surgery for the morbidly obese. This proven treatment for those who suffer from morbid obesity has resulted in reduction or elimination of diabetes associated with obesity and reduces the likelihood of stroke, heart attack, high blood pressure, and certain types of cancers. Consequently, this surgery dramatically reduces the healthcare costs of patients who undergo the procedure and makes sound economic sense.

Our healthcare delivery system can be made more efficient, bringing costs down, by using modern tools such as e-prescribing that Jackie has supported. She also supports wellness programs that emphasize prevention of disease and illness rather than the current focus on treatment that is far costlier.