Tim Ryan Holds Town Hall In Oskaloosa

Congressman Tim Ryan stopped in Oskaloosa to host a town hall meeting on Saturday, June 8, 2019.

Oskaloosa, Iowa – The process of selecting our next President is well underway. Tim Ryan is one of those seeking to hold that office, and this past week, he stopped in Oskaloosa to hear from its residents.

Ryan is just the third presidential candidate to visit the community this election cycle. Twenty-three democrat candidates are seeking the nomination.

Ryan, born on July 16, 1973, is in his 9th term in Congress, serving Northeast Ohio.

During his introduction speech to the dozen individuals he spoke about how his family struggled through the economic downturns, especially in areas of the country that relied heavily on manufacturing. Remembering the stories his relatives shared of having to box up the machines they were using to produce automobile parts and shipping it off to places like China and Mexico.

Ryan said that is how he grew up, watching manufacturing jobs depart for overseas. The nearby automotive factory had 16,000 workers but declined to a single shift with 4,000 workers before finally being shuttered completely.

Ryan said he “grew up watching the unraveling of the manufacturing economy.”

“Now we have an opioid crisis. We now have an infant mortality crisis, where African-American babies in Youngstown have a higher infant mortality rate than babies born in Iran,” Ryan said. “It’s just got progressively worse.”

He went on to say that healthcare coverage and pensions are plaguing people across the country. “The next president really needs to understand what people are going through.”

One of those ideas Ryan shared was bringing jobs building electric vehicles and growing the solar power production capacity to be the world leader in those industries.

“In the next ten years, there’s going to be 30 million electric vehicles built somewhere in the world. We should have a plan on how American workers make those. We don’t right now, and I know the President doesn’t.”

“We should figure out how we make the batteries. We should figure out how we make the charging stations. 30 million cars.”

“The charging station piece of the electric vehicle market is going to be a multi-trillion dollar industry. And right now, China controls 40 to 50 percent of the electric vehicle market.”

“We should be doing the same thing with solar,” Ryan added. “How do we figure out, how do we dominate the solar market. Right now, China controls 60% of the solar market.

Other areas of discussion included artificial intelligence, machine learning, and driverless cars. Ryan addressed that the steel industry became inefficient from the lack of innovation and believes that we must embrace the new technologies and “figure out how to dominate it, and make it work for our workers and increase productivity and cut workers in on the deal.”

“To me, that’s how we move forward, including building 30 million new electric vehicles somewhere. We should have a policy where we’re going to make them here in the United States.”

“The President doesn’t have that policy. He wants to look tough on China by the tariffs and everything else, but the reality is we have no long-term plan on how we’re going to get China. Beat China. Out-compete China. We need to put a plan together.”

Ryan then directed his attention to education and healthcare. Ryan supports a single-payer system and universal coverage. “I think we can start with a public option where people can buy in to get more accessible coverage.”

Reigning in the pharmaceutical industry is another point Ryan addressed. He spoke about how his mother struggles to pay for her medicine month after month. “This is the congressman’s mom who worked for the county who was supposedly suppose to have a decent retirement package.”

“So we’ve got to figure out how to get the pharmaceutical companies under control,” added Ryan, who says he favors letting prescription drugs in from Canada to increase competition.

Ryan is also proposing letting the Medicare Program negotiate down drug prices with the buying power of the Medicare Program.

Ryan says that 75% of the healthcare costs in the United States is chronic disease that are largely preventable. “If we focus on health. If we focus on food” and get the health care system working on prevention. Ryan says that the average diabetes patient costs the system about $14,000 a year or about $650,000 over their lifetime.

He says that with a $10,000 investment in diet, nutrition, teaching people how to cook, and understanding what foods to eat, “they are literally reversing diabetes.”

“But we don’t cover that. We cover the $14,000 a year forever, but we won’t pay the $10,000 on the front side to actually get people healthy. We can save trillions of dollars over the next few decades,”

On education, Ryan says we need to understand that many students are coming to school with trauma, “and when you are in trauma, you literally can’t learn. You’re brains not functioning properly.”

Ryan wants to put an initiative around trauma-based care for kids to allow them the ability to deal with the trauma in order to self-regulate and become self-aware and understand what is going on.

Ryan also believes that schools need to get back to vocational training in schools and home economics in schools. “Get back to the fundamentals.”

“Build stuff. Grow stuff, and take care of our kids,” Ryan said of education for the next generation of Americans. “This is how you transform your country.”

“These positive things are happening all around the country,” Ryan added. “They are happening now in schools, on farms, in health care facilities, where you are reversing diabetes, healing kids trauma, you’re building new industries where people are making a lot of money.”

In an interview with Oskaloosa News, Ryan responded to questions about being but just the third candidate for the Democratic Party to find their way into Mahaska County.

Ryan says that rural Iowa has been important because he comes from an area “that’s been forgotten in Youngstown, Ohio.”

“When I’m President, we’re not going to forget anybody. That includes the smaller towns that need investment; they need manufacturing. They need the downtown rehabilitated, and the theater rehabilitated. I’m going to have an agenda that’s going to stand tall for all of these small towns.”

“We’re going to get them up and running again, and that’s going to take a Federal Government action, that I need in the district that I come from, and the home towns that I grew up in, and we need it in rural Iowa.”

Mahaska County is a pretty red county for a blue democrat to visit and upset the apple cart.

Ryan said that he did well in his district as well did Donald Trump in the last presidential election. “A lot of people who gave Donald Trump a chance also see me as an attractive candidate. It’s because I talk about the working class. Farmers and factory workers, and single moms who are working really hard but can’t keep their nose above water.”

“Those are my folks that I represent,” Ryan added.

Ryan said he was initially drawn to politics to help the area he grew up in. “Young people were leaving. The downtowns were empty. We weren’t talking about the future of the economy, and I was tired of all the older people not doing anything. So I ran against the party, the Democratic Party there for state senate. I ran again against the party again for Congress. Won both times. So I know how to get things done as far as getting out there and reshaping the Democratic Party, which is what I want to do.”

“The Democrats have lost their connection to working class people, and we’ve become a coastal party, and I’m going to change that,” Ryan said in closing.