LINCOLN TO LOCAL Q&A with Gov. Kevin Stitt As he took office in early January, Gov. Kevin Stitt shared his goals for and thoughts on agriculture and rural Oklahoma with Farm Bureau members. met to help support those living in the rural portions of our state. I believe those core needs include access to healthcare, quality roads and bridges to move your product to market, and updated infrastructure for access to water and wastewater needs. As governor, I will also work with Secretary of Agriculture Blayne Arthur to minimize overregulation of farmers and ranchers, work to preserve the agriculture sales tax exemption and protect private property rights and landowners’ rights. Over the past several years, rural Oklahomans have been forced to drive farther and farther for critical health services with the closures of many rural hospitals. How can you ensure rural Oklahomans have access to quality healthcare? I believe we must improve access to rural healthcare by cutting government red tape, reviewing ways to give healthcare professionals more flexibility, and recruiting doctors and nurses to rural areas. This includes putting an increased focus on STEM education in Oklahoma’s rural schools and recruiting students from rural areas to pursue a degree in the medical field by encouraging initiatives such as the Blue Coat to White Coat program in our state. We must also adjust and pursue innovative medical care options, such as the telemedicine networks we are seeing in hospitals like Fairview Regional Medical Center. My administration will audit Medicaid to ensure the program is being run effectively and efficiently and look at ways to improve reimbursement rates so that it matches the rates of our neighboring states. This will provide additional financial support to Oklahoma’s rural hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare entities.
What are some of the biggest threats to the livelihoods of Oklahoma’s farmers and ranchers? How do you plan to address those threats as governor? I believe Oklahoma must set policy and communicate a vision that opens more doors for our agriculture industry to compete both in the national and international marketplace, that helps expand access to capital, and that ensures core needs are being 12 — Oklahoma Country
We want to provide our children and grandchildren with promising opportunities to return to rural Oklahoma. How can we keep some of our state’s best and brightest in rural Oklahoma? This is a very important question, and one of the reasons why I chose Blayne Arthur as my next Secretary of Agriculture. Blayne was raised in rural Oklahoma on a farming and ranching operation outside of Chickasha, and she and her husband have chosen to now raise their two young kids with a similar upbringing outside