Kimberly Hardy was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Maryland. She moved to North Carolina in 2016 and teaches social work at Fayetteville State University. She is serving her second term as second vice chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. She is a mother and describes herself as a “dog mom.”
Candidate Q&A
What do you see as the biggest financial and administrative challenge to implementing the work requirements for Medicaid that were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill?
First of all, this notion that there is this massive amount of Medicaid fraud is not true. What is being pushed forward is not necessary, and it’s a shame that we even have to have folks on Medicaid because we don’t have a healthcare system that works for everybody as a single payer system. Now, there’ll be a lot of bureaucratic changes that need to happen from an administrative perspective, and making sure that you can determine who is complying and who is not complying and eligible and all of this extra reporting — that’s just going to become a bureaucratic and administrative nightmare. It’s also going to cost money because there will have to be systems put in place to attend to this new set of steps that people have to go through.
What would be your plan for ensuring the future security/strength of Social Security and Medicare?
I’m a huge fan of taxing the wealthiest 1 percent and if we start taxing them on their second million dollars in this graduated way, so the more wealth they have, the more wealth we take in terms of a wealth tax, that can help fill some of the holes in the Social Security and Medicare system. [The government] keep[s] using it like it’s a piggy bank, and I think that’s not okay. We pay into these things with the expectation that when necessary, when the time comes, those resources will be there for us. And I just think we have to have some sort of legislation that specifically says that the Social Security and Medicare system are not to be touched for any reason, and those funds set aside.
What would you support in Congress as a plan to help control health care/ pharmaceutical costs?
We have to do things like ensure that there is competition in the market, that we regulate the max price for health care. [This issue] could go away if we had a single-payer health system like other countries do. If you are sick in this country and you need pharmaceutical care, I think that a single-payer system would make it possible for you to go and get those drugs, even if the copay still exists at something like $5. I have asthma, and so when I have to get [refills] on my [medicine] it’s like $5 or $6 for this six-month supply of medicine for my nebulizer because I have health care. That is something that should be available and accessible to everyone.
What steps would you take to improve access to health care in rural areas? How do we make the Rural Health Transformation Program successful in North Carolina?
We need to send money to these rural spaces so that they can maintain the hospitals that they do have and prevent them from closing … [and provide] a bigger infusion to reopen hospitals that are sitting there as just empty spaces for potential care.
One of those answers is an infusion of funds, long term, not just one-off grants … Some of it is an incentivization program for getting those care providers into the spaces, and then asking the experts in this space what it is that you all need from a legislative perspective from the federal level to ensure that the coordination of care makes sense from a health care perspective.
The rollout of AI is moving fast, including in health care, and leaders in that space are calling for things to slow down. What federal moves should be taken to regulate it, if at all?
I think federal regulation needs to say that you can only develop to a certain point. After that, you need to seek congressional approval. There needs to be oversights. You can’t develop a drug that’s FDA approved without going through the FDA. So there needs to be a regulatory commission, perhaps established specifically to monitor technological advances of AI, because it’s not like AI is bad. It’s just that it can get really bad really quickly. We regulate air pollution. We regulate it even at the level of your own vehicle going through emissions. So it’s possible to do it. But this is something that is going to harm a lot of people, wealthy or not, if we don’t put some regulation on it.
Where do you stand on federal vaccine policy? What should be done to prevent future disease outbreaks?
When I’m elected], we’re going to have some congressional oversight hearings to get rid of RFK Jr. You have no business being in charge of organizations where the public trust is truly sacred. We’re going to try to bring back those scientists that we lost under this administration to say we really need you to be here to help us with this because now we’re seeing a return of diseases … measles, mumps, and rubella. We are one bad uncovered sneeze away from having another disease outbreak. We have to restore the CDC by removing RFK from having any control over that at all. Getting this administration’s hands out of it, restoring, returning those people that we lost if they’ll come back to us to put those committees back in place so that we can have oversight for when there are outbreaks or potential outbreaks.
We’ve had some high-profile food contamination outbreaks, yet the federal government is pulling back on regulation of food, air and water. What level of federal regulation do you support and why?
The highest possible, right? We’ve got so many things […] food, air, and water [that] we literally need them to survive. I think the highest level of federal oversight has to be in place for this. I think that there should be regulation for all of these things, for food and water outbreaks and river contamination. I think that science-based federal regulation has to be critical. Public health should be the whole sort of fundamental at the forefront part of how we make this regulation. And polluters need to be held accountable financially. Inspection of food processing facilities definitely needs to be ratcheted up, and it needs to be both scheduled and unscheduled visits.
PFAS contamination is a nationwide issue; how do you address it while balancing public safety and business interests?
I don’t care anything about the business interests when your business is doing things that you know are harming people. Your business interest cannot come before the public health interest, the public safety interest. For too long in this country, we have prized business over people, profit over people, and that has to stop. How do we balance? There’s no balance. Public safety wins. Just because you’re able to do something doesn’t mean that you ought to. If you can find a way to do it responsibly and not harm people in the process, then by all means, go crazy in the free market. Public safety first, and then if your business can engage in safe practices that do not harm our water, our food, our air, then okay. But you are subject to oversight and regulation to ensure that.
The building and placement of data centers have become a big issue, particularly in many rural communities. What should be the federal government’s role, if any, in how these are developed?
[This topic] does need to have some federal engagement. The people, the communities themselves, should say whether or not they want this here. I do think there’s a federal role in terms of the environmental cost. We have to decide how many more of these do we genuinely need? We have to think about what is good for the people of this country, and if we cannot build these data centers in places that do not require us to cut down acres and acres of trees, in ways that do not harm our soil and water, in ways that do not harm the quality of life of the people who live around them, then you just don’t get to build it. I think you should have to get federal approvals for these things, and then also the state.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
We don’t have a healthcare system that supports the care of one’s health. It is a sick care system. It is expensive. It is arduous. Just yesterday I wanted to schedule my mammogram. You typically need orders from a primary care physician that I won’t get to see until December. It’s really absurd to me that we live in a country where access is there theoretically, but not in practice. And yet, there are bureaucrats whose healthcare will never be an issue for them, trying to take it away from the rest of us. When I win this seat, I fully intend to make sure that healthcare is accessible and available, both in theory and in practice, in a way that is not expensive, it is not arduous, it is not penalizing and mean-spirited.
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