Hochul, who is running against former Erie County Executive Chris Collins, wanted to convey the message to her constituents that she has worked for them in the past year and will continue to work for them moving forward.
“I feel we’ve made an impact,” Hochul said.”Whether it’s bringing in a million dollars in money that should’ve gone to our constituents, but didn’t. We’ve broken some red tape for our veterans to get them disability benefits and helped senior citizens, who are entitled to social security benefits that they never received, so at the local level we’ve done a lot to help individuals.”
While making strides at the local level since her term began in 2011, Hochul’s main focus for this election is on job creation and Medicare.
“I’m very focused on helping promote an American agenda, so we can support our local businesses and give them a competitive advantage, so it’s all about the job creation opportunities,” she said. “It’s about using my office, and ability I have as a member of congress, to be an advocate for creating jobs right here in America and I do that every day of the week. I’m out there trying to find ways we can get our good people back to work.”
When talking about the importance of job creation, Hochul believes the idea goes hand-in-hand with education.
“If we can get people back to work, we can solve a lot of problems,” Hochul said “There’s not so much of a need for people to be dependent on a helping hand from the government they can take care of themselves. We need to make sure people can be independent, have an opportunity for a good paying job, and a lot of that comes from education. It all ties back to if we can solve the job problem and get people who want a work an opportunity at a good paying job, the rest will take care of itself.”
For her hopes for Medicare, Hochul shared a personal story from her visit to Livingston County.
“I just got out of the American Rock Salt mine, 1,200 feet underground, and a gentleman who was probably in his low sixties came up to me in the mine and said to me ‘Keep fighting for Medicare,’” Hochul said. “Yes, it’s very much on the minds of people in this community of an aging population. People have paid into this program and it has been a guaranteed benefit for them since 1965. People, as they’re approaching that age when they should be able to benefit from it, or if you’re 54-years-old, you want to know that’s there, because before we had Medicare the largest reason people went into bankruptcy and you had 30 percent of our senior population living in poverty was because of the obscenely high cost of Health Care. This is a program that has saved people from spending their later years of life losing everything because of unexpected health care costs and I don’t want to go back to that.”
For more information about Rep. Hochul’s campaign, visit www.kathyhochul.com.