Northwest Ohio Healthcare Roundtable

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, during this Women's History Month, I rise to tell the story of a constituent struggling to deal with our challenged healthcare system.

Yesterday, I hosted a roundtable in Toledo, Ohio, with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and our northwest Ohio healthcare community.

During this roundtable, a constituent told us a story of her niece who was newly diagnosed with breast cancer. The niece is employed by a company based in Texas, but she works remotely from northwest Ohio, and she helps take care of her elderly grandmother.

Nonetheless, because her employer is out of State, local Ohio facilities will not accept her health insurance because she is outside the carrier network as it is called. Thus, for more than 2 weeks, she has had to delay treatment for her newly diagnosed breast cancer prognosis.

She wants to be near her family and not be alone while she receives treatment, but, unfortunately, she is being squeezed between the sides of our broken health insurance system.

If members of our medical community cannot even help their own family navigate this system, something must be done to fix it. This provider failure is simply unacceptable.

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