Kelda Roys Breaks Down KeldaCare Amid Wisconsin Governor Primary Shakeup

Look what happens when Republicans get power.

They use it immediately to hurt people, to trample our rights, to undermine the rule of law.

They don't care.

They just go.

And Democrats, we get power and we're like, let's do a blue ribbon commission.

Let's have a tiny meeting about that.

Let's do a poll and see what people think about that.

Absolutely not.

As governor, when we get power, I'm gonna use it to make people's lives better immediately and I'm not gonna stop.

Hello and welcome to The Dr. Kristen Lyrely Show.

I'm Dr. Kristen Lyrely and we have a special edition today because things are really heating up with the governor's race.

I am here right now with Kelderoy's Kelda.

Last week, the last couple of weeks have been total chaos.

It looked like everybody was starting to coalesce around Sara Rodriguez.

Then we find out that there are campaign finance issues.

She fires her manager.

She drops out of the race.

In the meantime, David Crawley was out.

He's back in.

He's got the governor's endorsement.

Everybody's vying for pole position.

The Marquette pole was in the field during all of this, so that's not going to be legit.

Like, what the heck is happening?

And how are you feeling?

I'm honestly feeling great because I feel like we've been campaigning for a year, traveling around the state, building support and momentum, but normal people weren't paying attention.

And

now they're

finally starting to.

People are actually realizing, oh, there's an election coming up in a few weeks.

Okay, great.

Let me look at the candidates.

And as they look, they see...

I've got the most experience.

I've got by far the most endorsements.

I picked up a lot of support from former Crowley and former Rodriguez supporters.

I've got the backing of WEAC and I've got the most money in the bank, even though I've already been up on TV far longer than all the other candidates.

So I feel like we have, you know, our rise and momentum has been, you know, huge and especially with Rodriguez withdrawing from the race.

People are looking for a progressive candidate whom they are confident can beat Tom Tiffany.

and deliver a democratic legislature.

And that's what I can do.

Well, I can tell you, in Northeastern Wisconsin, people are excited about you.

There is a lot of conversation about what Calda is doing.

And Calda has been present, and you've really invested in this part of the state.

And I think it's absolutely paying off.

That's great.

I mean, for me, I think it's critically important to winning the primary and the general.

You know, the road to democratic victories or Republican ones goes right through the Fox Valley in Green Bay.

So I'm really honored to have a huge amount of support there.

Why don't we turn our attention to what we were initially going to talk about here, which is health care.

Yeah, because of course I'm a physician.

You and I have known each other for I know I bring this up.

It's decades.

We've known each other for decades and we've worked on.

You've worked on a repro for a long time, but you are so much more than somebody who is just in the reproductive healthcare field.

And in fact, you have a really sweeping plan to help Wisconsinites who are struggling right now.

Affordability is the issue, and healthcare is at the core of it.

Caldecare is your plan.

Tell us about it.

My plan takes what is working in health care in Wisconsin, which is the coverage that I get as a state employee.

I'm a state senator, and so I'm covered under the state's employee health insurance plan.

And it's great, high quality, comprehensive care.

You can choose a high deductible kind of catastrophic plan with a really low premium, or you can choose a more normal, traditional, comprehensive plan, individual family.

The options vary based on where you're located in the state, right?

Of course, because there's different healthcare systems.

But many of the insurance companies that provide that coverage are non-profit.

And it's competitively priced, because we actually have one of the most competitive health insurance marketplaces in the country.

My plan is going to take that health insurance that state employees get and open it up to anybody in the state.

So anybody can buy in whether you're a state employee or not.

Now, taxpayers are not funding this plan, right?

It is...

You're going to buy in at cost, and so you're going to pay the coverage cost.

But what's really different about my plan is that it's a lot more than a public option.

Public option is where an individual or a family could buy in as an individual.

I will also allow employers to be buying in.

So for instance, I've been a small business owner for 13 years.

If I had to insure myself and my family through my small business, there's no way.

There's no way I'd be able to do that.

I was talking to a woman up in Merrill who has a mid-sized manufacturing company.

She used to be able to cover all the premium costs for her employees 20 years ago.

Now she's questioning whether she can even afford to have coverage at all, and she may just have to give her employees stipends to go on the exchange.

School districts, for instance.

I talked to a school teacher up in Superior who said their premiums are going to increase 38% this year.

their premiums.

Yeah, no teacher and superiors getting a raise.

In fact, they're all getting a functional pay cut.

So for folks like that, this could be transformative to be able to buy into this really stable, huge health insurance pool that will save them money, give them better coverage, and get rid of that time tax that is so draining on us that we're having to fight with insurance companies or figure out like where can I find the cheapest insurance that's going to meet the needs for myself and my family.

This is also going to pay a lot of dividends for rural Wisconsin, which is seen, as you know, devastating health care closures that are going to accelerate because of what Tom Tiffany did.

So Tom

Tiffany

and Donald Trump have made all these changes that are going to kick about 270,000 Wisconsinites off their coverage.

And that's going to reduce the care that people can get that's paid for.

It's going to increase all of our premiums as more and more people present at the emergency room because they don't.

have access to preventive care and basic primary care.

This is a way to blunt that because we're going to give those people coverage.

We're going to reduce uncompensated care and keep those rural hospital and clinics doors open for everybody.

We're already seeing this in Western Wisconsin where we've lost a couple hospitals recently.

One of my colleagues, Abby Lanu, who's an emergency physician, was saying, there's just no room.

And people are just showing up late, later than they would if they had had coverage, because they have no options.

They have no access.

And that is going to worsen so significantly at the start of the new year.

But your plan would allow people to get coverage.

And I think I heard you say early on, taxpayers aren't paying for it.

Is that

right?

That's exactly right.

So the benefits of my plan is that it's politically feasible, right?

Politics is the art of the possible, and you know, I'm a single-payer person.

I don't think it's reasonable that in the richest country in the world, we ration health care based on your wealth or your job.

To me, that's crazy, but I'm not running for Congress.

I can't pass Medicare for all.

I can't say, okay, everybody can go to the VA now.

What can I do as governor of Wisconsin?

Well, this is what I can do.

I can basically say everyone can buy into this pool.

It will save money for taxpayers as more people buy in because we're going to be able to share that administrative cost.

So it's not just the state employees, which is funded by taxpayers and by the employees themselves, but it's going to be everybody who's a part of that pool.

And it's going to reduce premiums for everyone because, of course, the whole premise of insurance is that you're sharing the risk.

And the more

bigger that pool is, the more you're sharing that risk, the lower the costs can be.

And so that will pay dividends for everybody.

And then, of course, the biggest dividend of all is when more people are covered, then you are reducing the uncompensated care that's a huge driver of those premium increases.

So even if you want nothing to do with Calda Care, you're happy with your own private insurance, that's fine.

You keep it.

You're still going to benefit from the people who are able to do this.

You know, we don't think very often about how much the way that we do health care in this country and tie it to your job distorts our economy.

It's crazy from having economic freedom.

Like how many people do you know that would have loved to retire but for not yet being eligible for Medicare?

How many people would love to start their own small business or go work for a startup but they can't because they can't afford to give up the health insurance benefits at their corporate job?

like think about the economic power we could unleash if people had access to great high quality affordable health insurance regardless of what their work situation was.

It is wild to me that your health insurance is tied to your job because the people who need it the most are people who really can't work in a job situation where they can get health insurance.

Like it doesn't make any sense at all.

Students, caregivers, right?

Right.

So let's dig into your experience as a legislator.

You're a longtime legislator in Wisconsin.

You have actually created legislation that expands health care access.

Talk a little bit about the stuff you've done.

Absolutely.

I think one of the things that sets me apart in this race, you know, for my friends in this Democratic primary is that I don't just have plans or, you know, bullet points.

I have actual bills that are ready to be passed into law and I have a long track record of getting things done.

And at the end of the day, who cares what ideas you have if you're not able to effectively turn them into law?

One of the things I'm most proud of is that my very first term in the assembly was in 2009.

That was the last time we had a Democratic trifecta.

And I was the vice chair of the health committee and helped lead the fight to expand badger care access to 80,000 previously uninsured Wisconsinites.

Now, when I was elected, I was in my 20s.

I was in my late 20s, and I was the youngest then-serving legislator in the state.

And I had actually gone without health insurance in my 20s, because I just couldn't afford it.

I was working at a nonprofit for an abortion rights organization, and I just couldn't.

There was just no way to buy health care that was affordable.

So I know how scary it is to think, gosh, I hope I don't get hit by a car.

I hope I don't find a lump in my breast.

And so I understand how life-changing that is, and I've always been very, very committed to what can we do to move the ball forward for people.

It is not acceptable to get power and then fail to use it.

And that's one reason I feel so strongly about running for governor, because too often I feel like Democrats are more interested in procedural fairness than in outcome fairness.

That is a real flaw in the system.

Because look what happens when Republicans get power.

They use it immediately to hurt people, to trample our rights, to undermine the rule of law.

They don't care.

They just go.

And Democrats, we get power and we're like, let's do a blue ribbon commission.

Let's have a tiny meeting about that.

Let's do a poll and see what people think about that.

Absolutely not.

As governor,

When we get power, I'm going to use it to make people's lives better immediately, and I'm not going to stop.

Part of Caldecare is addressing prior authorizations.

People, doctors, providers, hospital systems, patients, we're all frustrated about prior authorizations.

How are you going to use that power to push back on prior odds?

Well, we need prior authorization reform.

I mean, there are some things that we can do.

We can just.

basically streamline and say prior authorization should be, it should be presentably valid unless you object within a certain period of time and it's just approved.

I've also authored legislation to prevent the use of AI denials, because this is a thing that's happening, right?

These health

insurance companies are basically just doing thousands of denials a second, and that is not how prior authorization should work, because

I don't care how smart you think chat GPT is, they're not a doctor.

So they shouldn't be doing any prior authorization.

And you know, for a long time, we have really made it harder for ordinary people to get a remedy from government.

And I think just like any other consumer protection issue, having a defective health insurance.

product where you're paying in premiums and then they're basically being like nope sorry not covered or we're gonna just make you fight and fight and fight for it so then you give up and then we get to keep the money that is the business model for a lot of these health insurance companies

yeah

not all but certainly that is some of them so we need to make sure that our office of the commissioner of insurance in wisconsin can actually enforce consumer protection laws and can actually go after these guys from a regulatory perspective and say

No, you don't get to do that.

If you are denying too many of these claims, then we're going to be investigating you.

You don't get to sell people an insurance policy and then not provide the insurance.

I love that so much.

That is just music to my ears as a patient and as a doctor.

Right.

How much in

your

time do you spend on this?

Yeah, it is a total waste of time for me to know, to have a conversation with a patient who needs a hysterectomy and we've talked through all of the options and we've decided on this and then to be talking to a family medicine doctor or someone who doesn't even do hysterectomies about the indications and whether she should get it and what she has to do between now and then.

It's just so crazy and it doesn't make any sense at all.

But that's the world we live in and it's gotten so much worse in recent times with the introduction of AI.

So, yes.

Can we talk about workforce?

Let's change it.

Let's win.

Let's change it.

We have to change it.

And one way that we are going to reclaim health care in rural areas is by ensuring that we've got the doctors, the nurses, the techs, the people to be able to provide that kind of care.

Part of Caldecare is a workforce piece.

Talk about that.

Absolutely.

One of the things that I'm really proud of is that I've been on the forefront of trying to address the crisis and the caregiver shortage.

And this is personal for me.

My oldest stepdaughter, Erin, she just had a birthday yesterday.

She's a nurse.

She works in the cardiac ICU out in Seattle.

And I'm desperately trying to get her back to Wisconsin.

I don't know if that's going to work or not.

But she is about as bright a person as you could ever be.

And it was so hard.

She really had to fight to get into these nursing programs, even though she got her CNA in high school.

She worked at Hospice in high school.

That was her high school job, helping dying patients.

This is a woman who was absolutely made to be a nurse.

And yet we made it so hard for her to pursue that dream.

And then immediately when she got her certification, she was gone.

And we

see that again and

again and again.

So one of the things we need to do is expand this successful nurse educator program that puts in money into the state budget so that we can get more nurse educators because the nursing shortage is really acute and especially as we've got aging boomers that need more kinds of nursing care, this is urgent.

But longer term, we need to make it possible for anyone.

to be able to pursue a career in healthcare or medicine, regardless of the wealth that your family comes from.

A huge challenge in getting folks to serve in family practice or pediatrics or some of the types of medicine or in rural communities or underserved communities is that they've got huge medical school debt.

And those jobs don't pay as much as the highly paid specialties.

But the specialties also take...

a lot longer, right, to get that training in.

So you end up with a situation where people who go to medical school because they want to help people, maybe they want to serve an underserved community, but then they end up not being able to make ends meet because they've got $400,000 in medical bills.

So having a structured loan repayment assistance program for all kinds of providers who are willing to serve in underserved communities or in underserved practice areas like mental health,

I think is really, really important to just make it possible so that you don't have to come from family money to be able to afford to do that kind of care.

I think restoring collective bargaining rights for health care workers is also a really important piece of it.

You know, Wisconsin, when you're a licensed health care professional, physical therapist, nurse, mental health professional, you can go anywhere.

You're in high demand.

And people want to go to a place where they feel like their voice is respected, where they can be paid fairly for their work.

where they have basic benefits, and of course where they have rights and bodily autonomy.

We've seen how post-dobs physicians, nurses, other healthcare workers are just like, yeah, we're not gonna be, we don't want to be in those states where we, if we want to have a family, could have our lives put in jeopardy.

So we're not gonna go to these states that are restricting access to abortion because it isn't safe.

You're preaching to the choir.

That's right.

That's right.

So of course, you knew there was going to be a question about repro.

Caldecair includes a right to contraception, a right to IVF and language protecting patients from prosecution over pregnancy loss.

It is insane that we have to codify these things in law, but that's the world we live in right now.

And it also

includes guaranteeing your right to make your own decisions about abortion.

At the end of the day, there's just never a time when a politician is in a better position than you to determine what is the right choice for your own, your body, your health, your life, your family.

Senator Kildoroys, you are incredible.

I'm so proud to be your friend and to uplift you and just wish you all the best in the weeks to come in this crazy, chaotic race that you are running.

How can people find you and learn more about you?

Well, the best thing to do is to go on my website, kelderbroys.com, where you will see not just ideas and bullet points, but actually detailed plans of how I'm going to get stuff done.

And oftentimes, you can actually even read the bills that I'm putting forth.

Why do I have the strongest plan of any candidate in the race to immediately stop the unregulated development of data centers?

Because it's a complex issue, and it requires more than a bumper sticker gimmick.

And I've got the receipts on that.

People can also go to my social medias.

My handle is at Kelder Roy's, and I love hearing from people around the state.

You know, what's been so exciting to me in this whole journey is just seeing how as folks start to pay attention, they realize, yeah, there's a lot of candidates in the race, but there's one who really stands out as having the most experience, the most progressive, detailed plans of any candidate in the race, the most endorsements by far.

Everybody from we act the state teachers union to lieutenant governor Barbara Lawton Congressman Steve Kagan up in your neck of the woods You know and hundreds of local elected officials and community leaders all over the state And somebody who actually has a path to win the primary will beat Tom Tiffany and can help us deliver a democratic legislature and you know a lot of primaries make you choose between your heart and your head it's like

Should I back somebody who inspires me and is a progressive fighter and shares my values and is never going to compromise on things like defending trans kids or protecting our environment or health care public education?

Or should I try to go with somebody who is electable and has a lot of experience and statewide appeal?

Maybe somebody like me with rural roots in this primary.

Those people are one in the same.

It's me.

I am the progressive

who can win the primary, beat Tom Tiffany, and actually deliver the transformative progress of change that all

of us deserve.

Well said, my friend.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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