Megan Hunt, a candidate for the District 8 seat in the Nebraska Legislature, toured UNMC earlier this month.
Hunt’s tour included stops at the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center and the iEXCEL Visualization Hub.
A business owner, Hunt said she cares a lot about “brain drain” and economic development, and hopes in the legislature to help develop strategies.
“Nebraska Medicine and UNMC are doing a lot on the forefront of that,” Hunt said. “A lot of people don’t realize it’s not just a hospital, it’s a research facility, and that in itself is a huge economic driver for Nebraska. So if we want to take a big-picture look at what we can do in this state to attract and retain talent, to facilitate business growth and have an economic future for this state that’s sustainable . . . we have to look at all different sectors, including health care.”
What the state and UNMC are doing in the health field, she said, is fascinating.
“I learned so much about how cutting-edge this is, and how much leadership in the field there is here,” she said.
Hunt said that as a business owner, she has worked on health care issues with the Omaha Public School District, helping to update the comprehensive health care curriculum.
“I believe the policies that we make around health have to be based on evidence, have to be medically accurate, and have to be something with measureable outcomes for the people that they’re serving,” she said. “It worries me for our future that that is not the way policy making is going.”