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Your issues, their answers: Rob Harris sits down with Idaho gubernatorial candidate AJ Balukoff.

Idaho's race for governor is heating up. KREM 2's Rob Harris sat down with democratic candidate AJ Balukoff ahead of the Idaho primary.

Friday was four days until the Idaho primary. KREM 2 heard from democratic candidate AJ Balukoff.

R: Back in 2014, in a parallel universe where you won, what would look different today in Idaho.

A: Well we’d have better funding for public schools. We’d have medicaid expansion already accomplished.

R: So, bringing up education, that’s a big issue for you, you’ve brought it up several times, and you’ve been a part of the Boise School Board. You’ve talked about increasing funding available for schools, but being on the school board you know better than anyone that it’s not just more money that will help schools to improve. So what else needs to change to improve the quality of education?

A: Well, besides increasing the funding to our public schools, we also need to make sure we’re distributing it among the school districts correctly. The constitution mandates that the legislature provide and maintain a uniform and thorough system for public schools. We’re not doing that right now because you can look at the urban districts, like mine for example, and we provide a full curriculum, lots of opportunities. Kids besides the core classes can take art, music, foreign languages, advanced placement classes in high school and earn college credit. You go to the rural districts and some of them are going to school four days a week. I was in Arco just this last week talking to some teachers and the superintendent, and he had trouble hiring teachers. He had to bring in a teacher who retired seven years ago, talked her out of retirement to come and teach a class because he couldn’t hire a teacher. They don’t have an arts program, they don’t have music, they don’t have foreign language, they can’t offer advanced placement, so that;s clearly not a uniform and thorough system of public schools and we need to pay attention to that.

R: If you become governor and you’re able to increase the quality of education in Idaho, how do you keep these better educated students in Idaho after they graduate?

A: Well there are jobs here. The governor’s STEM action council testified to the legislature this year that there were 7,000 STEM jobs that went unfilled last year. And we just need to produce the workers that are qualified to take on those jobs. And those are good paying jobs.

R: You’ve said you want to expand medicaid to keep getting more and more people into coverage. As we get closer to 2020, more of that funding is going to be coming from the state, so where do you see that extra money coming from as more and more people enter medicaid?

A: Because we haven’t expanded medicaid, we have 62,000 people who are not insured. In 2012 the state and the counties paid 56 million dollars to pay for uninsured care. After the legislature finally authorized the health insurance exchange, more people were able to buy health insurance due to the subsidies. So last year, the states and counties paid 29 million dollars. They reduced that. I believe that expanding medicaid will alleviate most of that $29 million so there will be plenty of funds available to take care of Idaho’s share of paying for the Medicaid expansion. And Medicaid expansion will not only help those 62,000 Idahoans that don’t currently have insurance, it will also help the critical access hospitals in the rural parts of our state.

R: And you feel that will be possible even as Idaho’s responsibility within the Medicaid payment becomes higher over the next few years?

A: I believe that is correct. And of course, we’re going to have to watch what the federal government does with their share of Medicaid. There’s been talk of drastically reducing that and we’ll have to be prepared to respond to whatever they do.

R: This is not your first time running for governor. As you travel around, are you seeing anything to suggest that the outcome this year could be different?

A: Oh I am. People realize that one party rule has not served our state well. We’ve become a ‘scroll down state.’ If you want to see where we rank compared to other states in the nation, you scroll to the bottom to find Idaho, and people are realizing that we’d be much better served if we had some balance in our state government, bringing people together to have good decisions and good conversation to find the solutions that will solve the problems that we face. People are ready to look at bringing some balance to our state.

FULL INTERVIEW:

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