Wayne Turner was born in North Carolina, educated here in the public schools and university system, and has worked in different occupations here most of his life. Wayne will be 70 years old by the time of the election, He is retired and lives in Pittsboro, NC.
The job
The Governor prepares and presents a state budget, appoints many executive branch officials and members of boards and commissions, has veto power over the legislature.
Our Q&A with Wayne Turner
Do you have a plan to help control health care/ pharmaceutical costs?
Everybody knows the United States has higher health care than anyone in the world, that almost all the developed countries pay less than we do, and we shoot ourselves in the foot at the same time by refusing to negotiate drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid. Obviously we need to negotiate drug prices, but also take the profit motive out of healthcare with single-payer healthcare,
Greens have always been supportive of national single payer health care. We were dismayed with the ACA. We viewed the ACA largely as a gift to the insurance companies, as a way to keep them in business at a time when they were facing increasing challenges to their dominance, and to their mishandling of the healthcare market. We could have had single payer health care, and there was no reason not to do that.
As stated on the campaign website, I will advocate for our state’s representatives in Congress to support the Medicare for All Act in the U.S. House (H.R. 3421) and U.S. Senate (S. 1655).
Some of the states (Vermont, e.g.) have experimented with the idea of state health programs that are more like a single payer health care program in the state, I would very much like to see something like this investigated here.
In states, especially a state like North Carolina, which is the ninth largest state in population in the nation, the primary barrier remains that we have to convince the wealthier portion of the population that is in their best interest for the state to be more inclusive in things like health care, that they should see it as an investment in the future, not as something yanked from their pockets by force.
Where do you stand on time limits for Medicaid and work requirements for the program?
I’m opposed to (time limits/ work requirements for Medicaid recipients) for the simple reason that most of the people that are on these programs are not where they are economically and in their lives by choice. They’re there by circumstance, bad luck and, the failure of the US to create an inclusive and working economy.
What can North Carolina do to support rural hospitals?
First thing we can do is we can do what other states have done, and start passing laws against private equity investment in hospitals and practices. And when I say private equity investment, I also include university health systems.
Predatory private equity investors buy rural hospitals and practices, and then they reduce the number of beds because it drives their rent per bed up. They borrow debt in the name of the hospital or the practice that is responsible, that money transfers to the investors and shareholders, while the debt remains with the hospital or practice Or they look at a hospital and say, “we’ve only got e,g,,3% profit margin here, let’s just get rid of it” and they’ll sell it, or they’ll close it, put the practitioners out of business.” As I note on my website, private equity firms only hold these purchases for three to seven years before they sell and move on. The end result is healthcare deserts. I will work to limit private equity investment in the health services field in North Carolina.
Step two is, when we see a hospital is about to close, we go in there and we sit down with the doctors and the nurses and the practitioners in that area, and we figure out a way to keep it open. Whatever it takes. The state can’t cannot avoid its responsibility.
PFAS contamination is a state-wide issue; How do you plan to address this issue?
The first step is to get rid of the businesses that are producing it. If we recognize that these chemicals are going or cannot be easily eliminated from our environment let’s stop putting them in there. I don’t care if business is creating 600 jobs in an economically deprived area, if they’re poisoning the rest of the state and the world, then, then what good are they? I might not shut them down immediately, but I would certainly be looking hard for something to replace them, or I would encourage them to get into a different line of work. Another thing we could do is utilize the scientific resources in our university system. I would certainly suggest the state invest in using those capabilities to attack the problems of pollution by PFAS and other environmental threats.
I would also advocate for not letting companies Chemours and its former owner Dupont escape responsibility for the problem. At a minimum they should be funding research to eliminate PFAS from from the environment.
Is North Carolina ready for the next pandemic?
No. We haven’t learned anything from the last pandemic, and the politicization of the CDC and of science in general in response to the last pandemic has almost certainly harmed any effort we could make in the next pandemic to get people to follow the advice of the public health community.
It’s going to come up, and we’ll be in the same position we were with COVID, people will die,( and the state simply won’t have the ability to do anything. For instance, the state legislature passed a law recently saying that the governor, in the process of making an executive order, could not make any executive order that interfered with the operation of a religious institution, and so quarantine becomes impossible, and that leaves us only with, possible development of an antiviral or antibiotic that attacks the problem.
And, the people claiming we were so fast with COVID, well, we were fast with COVID because we were fast with many millions of dollars to give to these private enterprises to develop this vaccine. I don’t think we should be repeating that. Public research that is not resold to the people for private profit is a better path.
In 2009, Congress required more transparency from hospitals on their charitable work. What role, if anything, can the state do about requirements for nonprofit hospitals to justify their tax exemptions?
The nonprofit hospitals I would have to ask, how are they incorporated? What is their business model? Are they run as not for profits versus nonprofits? Are they 501c3? C4? What is their business model, and how does their supposed charitable work play into their tax exemptions? I don’t know much about it,I’m sorry to admit. I’ll have to educate myself on the topic.
What would you do if the legislature were to keep current abortion rules in place/What would you do if the legislature were to pass a heartbeat bill?
Unfortunately, the state legislature has stripped so much power from the governor’s office that the governor now in North Carolina is very close to being a figurehead. But I would use the position of the governor’s office as a bully pulpit to point out the errors of this, and claim that we should resist it, but I would have no legal authority to resist,. So it’s hard to say what I would do except complain about it, because it’s really all I could do in North Carolina.
I would advocate for perimeters around the existing abortion clinics so that anti-abortion activists could not be approached within a certain distance.
And I would push back against these crisis pregnancy centers, which are some of the sickest things I’ve ever seen in my life. We take public money and give it to these demagogues, They’re essentially churches. They exist largely to provide theological advice to people that need medical help.
These would be my responses to a possible heartbeat bill as well.
What can the state do to improve access to child care?
I’ve been driving across the state and everywhere I go,, I’ll see, a child care center, but they don’t have the capacity for more than 10 or 15 kids, and they have to split that among newborns to to two years old, toddlers and maybe some preschool aged kids four and five years old. . These little businesses cannot possibly handle the onslaught of serving 10 million people in a state where at least 85 percent of them probably are not served by any sort of reasonable childcare. And the existing ones charge as much or more than the cost of university or college tuition over a year, Families can’t afford that.
Some businesses have gone out of their way to implement childcare as part of their business, but those are few and far between, and a lot of businesses just won’t consider it. Years ago, I worked at Research Triangle Institute, and the employees there worked something out with the upper management such that they were actually able to establish a child care facility for RTI. But that’s not the norm, and usually only really big businesses would be able to do that in the first place.
This should be a government function, like public education.
What steps would you take to improve access to mental health services and to address the opioid overdose crisis?
Mental health services in the United States face a generational, historical problem that has still not been resolved, where it was assumed that people with any sort of abnormal behavior were somehow deficient, and their problem was something that you didn’t want near you. I know this is true because I saw it happen when I was growing up. It happened to my father. He became severely ill with what was eventually diagnosed as extreme bipolar disorder. But this was the 60s. There was simply no help for him. There was no structure in place to deal with it.
My response would be to bring greater public awareness of the issue and the appropriate response. People have been talking about mental health issues for four decades, if not longer, but here we are still, with people not understanding how to respond to it. This especially shows up in our policing. We have not as a society, evolved to the point where we are willing to put the resources into place to deal with it.
We should have emergency response teams that are trained to deal with calls that involve some individual acting out as opposed to committing violent crime. Raleigh had a chance to, Durham, Sylva successfully did this. Denver has successfully done it. Police forces in general are not trained to deal with people experiencing mental challenges.
Any other issues you’d like to weigh in on?
The Green Party is a federation of state parties, and each state party determines the contents of their platform, but we broadly agree on many things. We support single payer health care. We want an end to the use of fossil fuels, and also to the revival of nuclear power as an excuse to meet emission standards while surreptitiously rebooting an essentially dead nuclear industry. Greens want free education for all, and the abolishment of police and prisons. Our electoral system could easily be more inclusive and less prone to corruption with simple reforms. democracy with simple electoral reforms. Our end goal is living in a balance with Nature, and we believe that it is possible to achieve this, and at the same time offer the possibility of a life for all people that is fulfilling and rich.