I’m a registered nurse at Providence Medford Medical Center. I may be early in my career, but it doesn’t take decades in health care to recognize when a community is being left behind. I see it every day in the ER and patient rooms, and in the stories my patients share with me about struggling to access care. 

In Medford, we care for people from all across Southern Oregon. They come from smaller towns and rural areas because we’re one of the few hospitals in the region. Many of them are older adults living on fixed incomes. Some are low-wage workers who can’t afford private insurance. Others are just trying to recover from illness or surgery without going bankrupt.

These are the people our health care system should be designed to support. But too often, it fails them. And one reason it fails them is because their own representative in Congress, Cliff Bentz, is not fighting for them.

More than 45,000 people in Jackson County are enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan. That’s Medicaid. It helps cover doctor’s visits, prescriptions, mental healthcare and preventive screenings. When Congressman Bentz voted to support a federal budget that slashed Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars, he wasn’t trimming waste. He was threatening the care that thousands of people here rely on every day.

He also backed proposals to add new work requirements to Medicaid, even though most people on the program already work or are unable to due to illness, caregiving or disability. These changes wouldn’t help people find jobs. They would take away their coverage. That means more people showing up in crisis, more avoidable complications, and more stress on hospitals like mine.

Bentz has also voted against protecting and strengthening Medicare. He opposed letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices. He voted against capping insulin at an affordable price. He supports changing Medicare into a voucher program that would raise out-of-pocket costs for seniors and weaken the guarantee of care. That might not matter to a politician with great health benefits, but to someone in Talent or Central Point trying to manage their diabetes or heart disease, it matters a lot.

Congressman Bentz also supports raising the retirement age for Social Security, pushing it up to 69. That might not seem like a big change on paper, but in reality, it means people in demanding jobs — like construction, warehouse work, or nursing — must keep going even when their bodies say they can’t. That’s not policy. That’s punishment.

As a nurse, I don’t have the option to turn away from suffering. I can’t ignore someone in pain or pretend that policy decisions don’t have real, human consequences. I see those consequences every day — in the faces of my patients, in the stories of their families, and in the struggles of my colleagues.

Representative Cliff Bentz has the power to change that. He could choose to stand with the people of Southern Oregon. He could fight to protect Medicaid, strengthen Medicare, and safeguard Social Security for those who’ve worked hard and earned it. He could listen — to the nurses, the healthcare workers, and the patients who are asking for his help. So far, he hasn’t. But he still can. It’s not too late to do the right thing.

I’m calling on Congressman Bentz to stop voting the party line and start fighting for the people who sent him to Washington. If he wants to represent this district, he needs to represent its values, and that starts with standing up for health care.

Breanna Zabel is a nurse at Providence Medford Medical Center and is on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Nurses Association.