Paid for by Dr Nicholson for Montana | Morgan Sevier, Treasurer, PO Box 744, Billings, MT 59103
© 2023 All rights reserved.
for Montana Senate District 24
Issues
As a retired psychiatrist I am naturally interested in improving health care, especially mental health care.
Some politicians talk about mental health care. As a psychiatrist, I actually provided mental health care, treating patients with severe mental illness. Our mental health care system needs to go beyond crisis intervention. Montana needs more mental health professionals who can take people off wait lists and help them get as well as they can as fast as they can. That means better recruitment and supporting training programs. Montana also needs more capacity to help people with chronic severe mental illness without having resort to costly hospitalization. That means effective case management.
Medicaid Expansion is key to affordable health care and the legislature will have to reauthorize it in the next session. Medicaid Expansion is where hard working people—the people who dig landscaping, roof houses, fry burgers, wait tables, mop floors and clean toilets—and their families get a health plan when they don’t make enough to pay for an ACA health plan and their employers don’t offer a health plan. I support reauthorization of Medicaid Expansion without having to repeat the process every six years.
Maternal and infant mortality is higher in the United States than any other developed nation. We need to take measures to fix that. At the same time, individuals need to be able to make their own healthcare decisions. I support reproductive rights, including access to abortion.
How is it that when Montana has a huge budget surplus, makes tax cuts that favor corporations and the wealthy and makes tax rebates that we see the biggest increase in property taxes any one can remember?
Montana tax policy has shifted revenues onto property and disproportionally onto residential property. That’s not fair.
Working people and retirees need a fair tax policy.
Whether it is a two-year community college degree, an apprenticeship, a four-year degree or a professional degree, no one can compete effectively in today’s economy without that kind of training. And you can’t get to that kind of training without a high school diploma. That’s why I support good public schools where all of our kids are welcome to come and learn. An economy that works for us depends on a trained work force so I think it is fair to ask tax payers to pay for a good public school system that is run efficiently. On the other hand, I do not think it is fair to ask tax payers to pay for private schools on top of that. I will oppose efforts to syphon tax payer money out of the public schools.
When I was a kid, it did not rain in winter in Montana. Last Christmas Eve, here in Billings it rained.
When I was a kid, we did not have to close the rivers to fishing because the water was too warm for the trout. Summer of 2023, we had hoot owl fishing restrictions on parts of the Bitterroot, the Beaverhead, the lower Madison, the Ruby and the Sun rivers and all of the Jefferson River.
When I was a kid, we had forest fires but those forest fires were nothing like the monsters we are having now. In December 2021, the West Wind Fire burned 10,000 acres including the town of Denton. Yeah, December.
I don’t need to watch a PowerPoint presentation by a Nobel Prize winning climate scientist to convince me that the climate is warming up. It is happening over the course of my lifetime.
Think about it. What are we going to tell our kids and grandkids when they come and ask us, “Where did the fish go? What happened to the forests? Why doesn’t Glacier National Park have glaciers any more?”
What will we say when they ask us, “Why did you let this happen?”
Let’s not let this happen.
Paid for by Dr Nicholson for Montana | Morgan Sevier, Treasurer, PO Box 744, Billings, MT 59103
© 2023 All rights reserved.