Published: March 24, 2007 05:57 am      

Northup offers positions on education, health care

Gubernatorial candidate takes swipe at Gov. Ernie Fletcher

FRANKFORT — After weeks of criticism she wasn’t offering any ideas about problems facing Kentucky, Republican gubernatorial candidate Anne Northup Friday shared some general ideas about improving education and health care in Kentucky.

Northup, the former U.S. Congresswoman from Louisville, is one of two candidates challenging incumbent Gov. Ernie Fletcher in the May 22 Republican primary. The other is Paducah businessman Billy Harper. Northup’s primary claim to the GOP faithful thus far has been that she can win in November while Fletcher can’t, something Harper also claims for himself.

But Friday Northup said it is time to reassess the Kentucky Education Reform Act, for which she voted while in the state House of Representatives in 1990, and especially its Kentucky Core Content Test. Northup said it may be time for Kentucky to adopt “an off-the-shelf test,” probably the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills or CTBS which can show parents how students perform against the performance of other children across the nation.

“We need to take a good, hard look at our testing system,” Northup said, although she stopped short of saying the present test or KERA should be scrapped. She also called for more emphasis on math and science education because those fields are required for many of the high-tech, high-paying jobs of the future. She said she generally supports differentiated pay to attract more math and science teachers.

Northup said she isn’t trying to “undermine KERA” as some opponents did when the education reform passed, but rather she wants to make sure it’s the right system for today’s children and times.

Her running mate, House Minority Leader Jeff Hoover, said he and Northup are hearing from people across the state that “you’ve got to do something about the testing. We need to step back and say what can we do and what can we do better.”

Northup would also allow superintendents to have more say in hiring school principals, a responsibility KERA places with school based decision making councils; making sure Kentucky properly identifies special needs children and accesses all available federal funding for their education; and providing intensive English language education for non-English speaking students.

She proposes some familiar Republican approaches to holding down health costs, including allowing people to invest in health savings accounts to cover routine medical needs and expanding catastrophic health insurance coverage. She also supports limiting malpractice awards (tort reform) by juries to reduce the costs of “defensive medicine” — ordering any available diagnostic test or treatment to protect against later litigation — to hold down costs.

Northup said she would explore contracting Medicaid services to private managed care firms. She said the effect of some similar measures instituted by Fletcher won’t be known for some time but suggested basing some managed care on a system used in the metropolitan area of Jefferson County probably won’t work in some parts of rural Kentucky. She also would collaborate with other states to re-import prescription drugs from Canada, a position she took in Congress in opposition to her party’s leadership there.

But most of all, Northup said, “We will lead,” a swipe at Fletcher who she said has waited for legislators to pass tort reform.

“What Jeff and I are saying is we won’t sit around there and wait for the bill to come to us, because if we do that, it will never come,” she said. Hoover also took a swipe at Fletcher who late in the current legislative session announced support of a Senate plan to reform the state employee pension plan.

”We’re not going to sit down there and wait till the 28th day of a30-day session on the pension system,” Hoover said. “The pension system will be addressed before (lawmakers) get there.” He later told reporters he didn’t think the plan to change the system will pass this session.