Kalispell physician-legislator to challenge Tester

HELENA — A Republican lawmaker from Kalispell announced Tuesday that he will challenge Montana’s Democratic U.S. senator in 2018.

State Sen. Al Olszewski will seek the Republican nomination to run against Jon Tester, the state’s senior senator. Tester has said he plans to run for re-election to a third Senate term in 2018.

Olszewski, an orthopedic surgeon, currently represents Senate District 6, which extends from Polson to the Lower Flathead Valley, including most of the shore of Flathead Lake. He served one term in the state House before being elected to the Senate last year.

In an interview in his Helena office on Tuesday, Olszewski said he was motivated to run for Senate by the same issues that prompted him to serve in the Legislature.

“The big issue for me is that as I was dealing with the regulations that were getting between me and my patient, the unfunded mandates were leading me to pay more attention to the government than to the person’s problem or impairment that brought them to me as a doctor,” he said. “I thought that with the knowledge and skills that I’ve learned, not only as a physician but as a legislator, that maybe I can be helpful and may be able to do some good work at the national level.”

During his two legislative terms, Olszewski has focused his work primarily on health-care issues, including legislation related to Medicaid, physician licensing and proxy decision-making for patients. He currently serves on the Senate committees on public health, finance and agriculture, as well as the joint appropriations subcommittee on public health.

He remains an opponent of the Affordable Care Act, and voted against the state’s 2015 expansion of Medicare under the landmark federal health-care law.

“I acknowledge the fact that there’s more people that have insurance, and that has had benefits, especially for hospitals and for the medical industry,” he said. “But when we deal with such a significant increase in using Medicaid as a vehicle for providing that health care, I think what we’ve done, especially as we see in this state, we see that Medicaid is not a perfect system to promote or use” as a way to fund health care.

Republicans in Congress last month proposed and ultimately withdrew the American Health Care Act, intended as a replacement to the Affordable Care Act, after it ran into resistance and was estimated to drop health coverage for 24 million Americans. Olszewski called the failed initiative “incomplete.” He said while it “offered us one of the largest removals of taxes, actually, in the history of our country,” it failed to strip away many of the regulations he sees as burdensome on the industry.

As a state legislator, Olszewski has also sought to restrict abortions in the state, sponsoring a 2015 bill — ultimately vetoed by the governor — that would have required anesthetizing a fetus older than 20 weeks before an abortion, and this session he sponsored legislation to make abortion illegal if the fetus has at least a 50 percent chance of survival.

Chris Meagher, spokesman for the Montana Democratic Party, released the following statement following Olszewski’s announcement Tuesday:

“Al Olszewski may be one of the most radical politicians in the state Legislature, and his agenda would hurt Montana’s women and families. Montanans don’t want politicians like Olszewski and the federal government getting between women and their doctors, and he’s wrong for Montana.”

On another hot-button issue, Olszewski said he’d consider proposals to transfer some federal public lands to state ownership “as a possible plan to fix the issue that we, as Montanans, are unable to use public lands for our natural resource economy.”

His experience working in the state’s lawmaking body, he said, has taught him how to work on both sides of the aisle to craft and pass legislation, a background he said he would take to the Senate to cut regulations on agriculture, banking and finance, the coal industry and the timber industry.

“We are just going to need to find that right balance and I think the pendulum has swung too far,” he said.

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.