(Radio Iowa) – State Auditor Rob Sand, the only Democrat who’s running for governor, is proposing new initiatives to address concerns about Iowa’s water quality and what he calls Iowa’s sky-high cancer rate. Sand promises to create a task force to find solutions to the state’s cancer crisis and he proposes income and property tax credits for farmers who implement in-the-field conservation projects.
Sand also says the state needs to verify that farmers are following the manure management plans they’ve submitted. He’d set up what he’s calling a “dirty water” notification system to alert Iowans when rivers and lakes are unsafe for recreation and when nitrates in drinking water are too high.
“I think that we’ll see real substantial improvement if we actually invest in monitoring and we invest in conservation programs in a way that politicians so far haven’t been willing to despite the fact that Iowans across the political spectrum want these things,” Sand said.
Sand says another step toward improving the health of Iowans would be unraveling the system launched in 2016 that has private companies managing care for Iowa Medicaid patients. “Privatization of Medicaid is literally inherently a disruption of services,” Sand said. “It’s raising costs for everybody in the state. It’s making things incredibly expensive and part of the way that they make a profit is by disrupting services and denying services.”
Sand made his comments during an interview with Iowa Public Radio. Sand toured the University of Dubuque’s College of Osteopathic Medicine and met with health care workers in Waterloo yesterday (Thursday).
