Ryan Binkley, president and CEO of Generational Group in Richardson, Texas, told Newsmax on Thursday a key component to his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is reforming health care by taking on big pharmaceutical companies.
"We need to have absolutely a Republican-led transformed health care plan that demonopolizes Big Pharma, demonopolizes the health insurance exchanges, as well as the health care providers," Binkley told "American Agenda." "This is the big problem. There are oligopolies really in every state where you have too few competitors setting prices, where patients are no longer in charge, and it has a huge effect on our economy and the inflation we have today.
"Medicare, Medicaid and all of health care is about 35% of our budget that's going out the door. As we're spending more money than we have coming in by about a trillion-and-a-half dollars a year, as the Fed starts printing money, and as we make interest payments, health care is a big part of that."
Binkley co-founded Create Church, a multiethnic, multigenerational church in Richardson, with his wife Ellie. He said he also has a plan to reduce poverty, violence and despair in urban areas without expanding the government.
"The Republican Party is not engaged in urban America," he said. "We have to dive into it, and the way I want to dive into it is helping to do private community centers and really encouraging through leadership that all of us own our city. Start encouraging volunteerism again. I actually want to start a movement like the Peace Corps was in the '60s and '70s to have hundreds of thousands of college students start investing five hours a week teaching urban middle school kids how to read, write and do math.
"They're falling so far behind in reading. Once they get up in the high school level, start teaching trades again. We haven't taught vocational trades as an emphasis in decades and we need to get back to that. Once we start teaching how to have a career, we'll start setting urban America in a revival for jobs again. It's a jobs movement, a revival of volunteerism. That's what we'll start as president."
Binkley said he is close to qualifying for the first Republican primary debate on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. He said he expects to hit 40,000 donors sometime Thursday but has not yet reached the 1% threshold in certain polls required by the Republican National Committee.
"We qualified in one poll; I think they're waiting on a couple more to come this week," he said. "Just praying we get there. Right now. There's so much to be said at this debate. It's so important that we hear a number of voices there. I really want to communicate this message that it's time for an economic revival in our country, and we will do that. I just launched a seven-year economic plan to balance the budget and obviously fix big problems like health care, the border and urban-American education."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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