There is a myth that rural health care uses up a lot of the health care budget when in fact, on a per capita basis, rural health care is cheap, and it's cheap because people don't access health care. So we spend less per person in rural areas on health care than we do in urban areas, and we do need to look at an equitable distribution of the health care dollars that we do spend, and we do need to look at equitable ways to spend our education dollars as well. It's important to get more doctors out there to provide the support to the communities, so those communities can be productive, industry-creating ones.
On October 23rd, 2006. See this statement in context.