- Iowa Congressman Randy Feenstra met with business leaders at Glenwood State Bank in Mills County. From there, he went to Council Bluffs to talk healthcare.
- In Mills County, he fielded questions on a range of issues including interest rates, foreign policy, levees along the Missouri River and real estate.
- Before Feenstra headed to Council Bluffs we asked him about Iowans having access to rural healthcare, an issue he says he's working on in Congress.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
It's Thanksgiving break and members of Congress are back in their districts speaking to constituents. I'm Southwest Iowa reporter Katrina Markel and I caught up with Congressman Randy Feenstra who met with business leaders in Glenwood, Iowa.
At two separate stops, voters told Feenstra what's on their minds: In Glenwood they talked about how to grow the economy. In Council Bluffs, it was maintaining rural healthcare.
"We're having women driving 50-75 miles for maternity healthcare,” said Feenstra.
"That's not right. We also see this where somebody has a stroke or a heart attack or whatever, where they're waiting 15-20 minutes for EMS to arrive."
He says he hopes to incentivize family physicians to stay in Iowa and keep rural hospitals open.
"The thing that we need to do is make sure we don't have closures of maternity units, that we don't have closures of the emergency rooms because that's what happening all across our state. That's scary times," said Feenstra.
If some of the rural hospitals in southwest Iowa closed – residents could be more than 50 miles away from a Council Bluffs facility — life and death in an emergency.
