Where Rick Stands

Rick’s campaign comes down to three main things: Affordability, Accountability, and Results. Here’s what that looks like on the issues families across Northeast Wisconsin talk about at the kitchen table—not poll-tested talking points, just where Rick stands and why. This page will grow as the campaign does. If there’s an issue you care about that you don’t see here, Rick wants to hear it. That’s the whole point.

AFFORDABILITY

You should be able to afford a good life.

Too many people are working harder than ever and still falling behind. That’s not a personal failure. It’s a system that’s stopped working for regular families. Rick believes a paycheck should add up to a stable life, not a stack of bills you’re afraid to open. What that means in practice:

Raising Wages for Working Families

Work should pay enough to cover the basics, care for your family, and have a little breathing room. Rick will fight for wages that reflect what life actually costs in Wisconsin.

Affordable Housing in Northeast Wisconsin

Rent and home prices are crushing young workers, families, and seniors while Wall Street investors buy up neighborhoods. Rick supports building more affordable homes, protecting renters, and giving first-time buyers a fair shot.

Lowering the Cost of Living

Groceries, prescriptions, child care, healthcare, utilities—the basics keep climbing while paychecks don’t. Rick will go after price-gouging and the corporate middlemen padding their profits on the backs of working people.

A Fairer Tax Code for all the People

For too long the rules have been written to benefit those at the very top. Rick believes tax-paying responsibility should be fairly distributed with the heavier burden on the wealthy.

HEALTHCARE

Health care should be something you can count on, not something you gamble on.

No one should have to choose between a doctor’s visit and a car payment, or ration their medication to make it to the end of the month. Rick believes affordable, reliable health care is a right for every person, not a privilege for those who can afford it. Here’s where he stands:

Lowering the Cost of Health Care

From surprise bills to sky-high premiums, the system is built to confuse you and overcharge you. Rick will fight to cap out-of-pocket costs, to make prices clear and fair, and to remove barriers to medical care created by prior authorization requirements from insurers.

Lowering Prescription Drug Prices

The medications people need to stay alive, like insulin and inhalers, should not cost a fortune. Rick supports Medicare negotiating drug prices and capping what families pay at the pharmacy counter.

Protect Medicare and Social Security.

Seniors paid into these programs their whole working lives. Rick will defend them against any attempt to cut, privatize, or gamble away the benefits people earned.

Protecting Rural Hospitals and Mental Health Care

When a local hospital closes, a whole community pays the price. Rick will fight for the rural hospitals, clinics, and mental health and addiction care that Northeast Wisconsin depends on.

WOMEN’S HEALTH & REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

Health care decisions belong to women and their doctors, not politicians.

Rick trusts the women of Northeast Wisconsin to make their own health care decisions, in private, with the people they love and the doctors they trust. Government has no business in the exam room.

Rural Maternal Care and Hospital Closures in Wisconsin

Across Northeast Wisconsin, hospitals are closing their labor and delivery units, forcing women to drive long distances for prenatal care and to give birth, putting mothers and babies at risk. The strain falls hardest on rural and underserved communities. Rick will fight to keep maternal care close to home, reverse the closures pushing care out of reach, and back the investments that keep mothers healthy before, during, and after birth. Where you live should not decide whether you survive childbirth.

Protecting Access to IVF and Fertility Care

For families struggling to have children, fertility treatments like IVF are a path to the family they have always wanted. Rick will protect access to IVF and fertility care and stand against efforts to restrict it, because the decision to start or grow a family belongs to the people living it.

Protecting Birth Control and Contraception Access

Access to birth control is basic health care, and it is under threat. Rick will protect access to contraception for everyone in Northeast Wisconsin who needs it, and he will stand against any effort to put that decision in the hands of politicians.

Reproductive Health Care is Health Care

Contraception, cancer screenings, prenatal care, and the full range of reproductive health services, including abortion, are health care. Rick supports a woman’s right to make these deeply personal decisions with her family, her faith, and her doctor, not a politician in Washington or Madison. He will protect access to reproductive health care and oppose efforts to criminalize the women who seek it or the doctors who provide it.

VETERANS

Rick swore an oath to this country. He’s keeping the promise.

Rick served in the U.S. Army, and he knows the promise this country makes to the men and women who put on the uniform. Too often, Washington breaks that promise the moment they come home. Rick will make sure the people who served get what they were promised.

VA Reform and Accountability

Veterans shouldn’t wait months for care they’ve already earned. Rick will fight for timely, quality treatment and a VA that actually answers when a veteran calls.

Veterans mental health and suicide prevention

Too many veterans are lost to suicide and homelessness. Rick will fight for the mental health care, housing, and support that keep our veterans living with dignity and honor, fit for the sacrifices they made.

Jobs and Opportunity After Military Service

The skills our service members build are second to none. Rick will protect the GI Bill and support good jobs, training, and education so veterans can build a strong civilian life.

Delivering Veterans’ Earned Benefits

Veterans’ benefits are not a line item to bargain over. They were earned. Rick will defend them.

Honoring Hmong Veterans who fought for the United States

During the Vietnam War, Hmong soldiers fought and died alongside American forces in Laos, and many made Wisconsin their home. Too many have never received the recognition or benefits they earned. Rick will fight to secure full recognition and the veterans’ benefits owed to Vietnam-era Hmong veterans for their service to the United States.

FARMING & THE RURAL ECONOMY

Family farms built Wisconsin—and Washington keeps forgetting it.

Wisconsin runs on agriculture, but the people who actually work the land are getting squeezed from every direction—by low prices, rising costs, and corporate giants that would rather buy them out than compete with them. Rick believes a strong rural economy starts with standing up for the family farmer.

Fair Prices for Family Farmers.

Dairy and crop prices swing wildly while input costs only go up. Rick will fight for policies that give family farms a fair, stable shot—and stand up to the consolidation squeezing them out.

Taking on Corporate Monopolies in Agriculture

A handful of corporations now control seeds, processing, and the supply chain, and they set the terms. Rick supports real competition and a fair marketplace, including the right to repair the equipment you own.

Investing in Rural Wisconsin.

Reliable broadband, decent roads, and good local jobs aren’t luxuries—they’re what keep small towns alive. Rick will fight to bring that investment home.

Helping the Next Generation of Farmers

Young farmers can’t afford to start, and aging farmers have no one to pass the land to. Rick supports making it easier for the next generation to keep Wisconsin farming.

IMMIGRATION

We can secure the border and treat people like human beings.

Most folks want the same commonsense thing: a system that’s orderly, fair, and actually works. After 40 years without comprehensive reforms, our immigration laws no longer reflect the realities of today’s world. Rick will work with anyone to solve the problem instead of running on it to win elections.

Real Border Security that Works

An orderly, lawful, well-resourced border is the foundation of any working system. Rick supports giving border agents the people and tools to do the job right, focused on the real threats: shutting down the trafficking and fentanyl smuggling that hurt our communities. Securing the border and treating people humanely are not opposites, they are how a functioning system works.

Fixing a Broken Immigration System

It should not take a decade and a fortune to immigrate the right way. Right now, legal pathways exist on paper but leave families, workers, and students waiting years or decades for visas they have already earned. Rick supports clearing those backlogs and modernizing the process so the system actually rewards people for following the rules.

Protecting Wisconsin Farms and Workers

Wisconsin is America’s Dairyland, and our dairy farms and food processors rely on a year-round workforce. But our main farm visa does not fit the needs of our farmers, leaving them short-staffed and workers without legal footing. Others who are here legally, seeking asylum or under temporary protected status, wait months or longer for work permits while farms and factories sit short-handed. Rick supports modernizing our farm visa programs and clearing the work authorization backlogs so employers can plan ahead and workers are protected from exploitation. Wisconsin’s farms cannot keep running on a system Washington refuses to fix.

A Fair and Human Path Forward

A fair and humane path means dealing honestly with the people already here who are working hard, paying taxes, and contributing, from Dreamers who grew up as our neighbors and classmates to the workers and families woven into our communities. Rick supports an earned, commonsense path to legal status for people who want to keep contributing.

It also means a system that works while treating people decently: ending arbitrary and for-profit detention, guaranteeing due process, and clearing the backlogs that leave people waiting years or decades for visas. We can do all of this while keeping our country secure, and we should lean toward saying yes to people chasing their American Dream.

These are the fights Rick is taking to Washington. If they’re your fights too, get in this with us.

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