Policy

Fran has a vision

A better Wisconsin is possible, and we all have a role in building it. Any argument that we need to accept less is bullshit.

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Priorities

Schools

  • No child should go hungry. We have the means to help. As a state rep, Fran wrote a bill to provide free healthy school meals to all children, helping Wisconsin farmers and lowering costs for families.

  • Fran has a model to guarantee universal childcare. Through a program based on childcare plans in New Mexico and Vermont, families will be able to access affordable, high-quality childcare with either no out-of-pocket costs, subsidies, or strictly capped prices.

  • Not too long ago, Wisconsin’s public schools were considered some of the best in the country. Fifteen years of Republican funding cuts have decimated them and abandoned parents, teachers, and students. We owe it to our future to resurrect our best-in-class primary education system — a project that starts by fully funding our public schools, public universities, and tech colleges.

  • Public dollars belong in public schools. Every child deserves a strong and comprehensive education. Voucher programs lack transparency and oversight and use discriminatory admission policies. As governor, Fran will push to roll back the unfair voucher program, which gives financial advantages to private schools over public ones.

  • Wisconsin only funds around 40% of special education costs for school districts, putting local taxpayers on the hook for over a billion dollars in public education costs. We can care for all of our students while investing in our communities by increasing this essential funding.

  • Our public universities have been underfunded for decades and reeling since the passage of Act 10. Fully funding public universities and tech colleges, as well as restoring collective bargaining power for their workers, is the bare minimum. Fran will work to increase essential funding for programs that support students of all backgrounds and give educators a seat at the table.

Workers

  • Nobody should have to decide between paying the bills and taking care of themselves or a sick family member. Fran’s universal paid leave bill would provide fully insured paid leave for all workers — including the self-employed.

  • One job should be enough. Fran supports a living wage — a $20 minimum wage indexed to the cost of living in Wisconsin.

HEalthcare

  • Until the federal government does its job, we have to use every tool at our disposal to make healthcare as affordable as possible for every Wisconsinite. This is a multi-prong effort. We will:

    1. Expand Medicaid.

    2. Develop new kinds of BadgerCare programs that include more kinds of people — like a Basic Health Plan.

    3. Establish a robust public option that competes with private insurance plans — proven in other states to lower insurance premiums.

  • Healthcare costs are high because healthcare prices are high. Right now, the biggest hospital systems in Wisconsin charge private insurance companies up to four times [↗] what Medicare pays. These costs trickle down as higher premiums for everyone. Rep Hong has a plan to bring exorbitant prices in line with fair market value and invest the savings into small hospitals and healthcare programs that help all of us.

  • Insurance companies will do anything they can to avoid paying your healthcare claims. As governor, Fran will crack down on claim denial processes, mandate coverage for medically necessary care, and develop new ways for you to fight back when you get pushed around.

  • Wisconsin has several multi-billion-dollar hospital systems that pay nothing in taxes. It’s time they pay their fair share. Fran will advance a bill that forces large hospitals to use the tax breaks we give them to invest in community benefits and subsidized care.

  • When drug prices have no anchor, ambiguous coverage and inflated costs surprise you at the checkout line. By pooling the state’s resources to negotiate better prices and creating a streamlined infrastructure, we can lower costs and extend coverage for everyone.

  • Everyone deserves to live safely in their own body. Fran recognizes gender-affirming care as medically necessary and would veto bills like AB 104 that intrude on personal healthcare issues and prevent families from seeking the healthcare they need.

Housing

  • Homeowners need stability in their mortgages — so do the people who construct housing. Housing is unaffordable because building housing is expensive, and a major reason construction is expensive is the difficulty of securing cohesive construction financing. Through her public bank plan, Fran can develop a backstop to streamline the financing of affordable housing construction — and bring in new sources of construction financing — bringing costs to build and own down.

  • Developers should be able to construct affordable housing almost anywhere. Fran’s affordable housing zoning overlay will streamline the process of building housing meant for regular people, not multimillionaires, and her developer tax incentive structure will make sure the housing that gets constructed stays affordable.

  • Wisconsin's community land trusts (CLTs) and limited-equity co-ops (LECs) are innovative housing models that have been proven to make it possible for low- and moderate-income people to own a home, build generational wealth, and stay in their communities — while insulating neighborhoods against rampant speculation. As governor, Rep Hong will invest in stabilizing, financing, and promoting CLTs and LECs.

  • We're going to make sure nobody goes to sleep cold. Renter protections are often haphazardly enforced. Rep. Hong will use her executive authority to bolster rental unit regulations and pursue aggressive regulation of slumlords and serial housing-law violators, while making it easier for tenants to flag issues and find support.

  • Fran will put front-and-center a statewide Right to Counsel program, which makes it much easier for people facing eviction to access the legal resources typically only afforded to wealthy people — a program Milwaukee’s pilot has shown saves everyone a lot of money.

The Care Economy

  • Fran will help sustain mental healthcare programs, social workers, and rural hospitals by increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates.

  • Too many nursing home residents face abuse, neglect, or inappropriate care, and hospital understaffing leads to burnout and decreased care quality. One of the strongest predictors of care quality in a nursing home or hospital is whether there are enough nurses and nurse aides on duty. Fran has sponsored legislation [↗] to mandate safe staffing in hospitals and will continue the fight to ensure both kinds of facilities employ enough workers so patients and workers alike get the treatment they deserve.

  • We can’t have a universal childcare program if workers aren’t getting the wages they deserve. Fran’s model includes increased reimbursement rates and worker loan forgiveness programs to ensure there are enough caregivers to meet demand.

Small Businesses

  • Megacorporations and the ultra-wealthy have access to more low-interest loan options than small businesses. We deserve a bank owned by, and meant for, regular Wisconsinites. The Wisconsin Public Bank, inspired by North Dakota’s century-old model, can be used to give small businesses better rates on the loans they need to grow.

  • Monopolies devastate local businesses, gouge customers, and tilt the balance of economic power toward megacorporations. As governor, and in collaboration with the office of the Attorney General, Fran will establish comprehensive antimonopoly regulations to keep markets fair and competitive.

Cities and Towns

  • Fran will right-size a grossly unfair revenue sharing model that leaves cities and towns across the state scrambling to access the tax revenue they generate. State and local governments are partners, not rivals. Fran can uphold the state’s end of the deal by:

    1. Lifting restrictions on how much a local government can levy to fund essential services, indexed to local costs

    2. Giving counties and municipalities access to means of financing beyond property taxes

Disability Justice

  • It’s long been proven that home healthcare—getting care at home instead of being warehoused in a nursing home—is better for patients and the state alike. Fran will begin a comprehensive review of our home healthcare allocation process, led by patients, to develop a best-in-class system that gets people the care they need.

  • In Wisconsin, a person with a disability who makes one dollar over $37,650 loses all access to Medicaid and other disability programs — meaning people who want to work aren’t allowed to. Fran will remove this hard cap and replace it with a model that lets people who can work but still need disability care live the lives they deserve.

  • Like social workers and nurses, home health aides are the backbone of our long-term-care infrastructure. But because wages are so low, many families can’t find enough aides to meet demand. Fran will direct the Medicaid program to require a living wage for home health aides — essential labor demands respect.

Labor

  • Fran will nail the coffin of Act 10 shut and lead the fight to enshrine a constitutional right for all workers, public and private, to organize. She’ll lead the fight to repeal economically damaging right-to-work laws and reinstate prevailing wages.

  • Wages and working conditions are the bare minimum. Fran believes that our government functions best when its workers participate in executive decision-making and would develop a tight, functional relationship with the state workforce.

  • Rebuilding Wisconsin isn’t a metaphor. We’re going to need to break ground on new, ambitious infrastructure if we want to right-size the state — and we’re going to do it with union labor.

  • Union workers shouldn’t be penalized for exercising their rights. Fran will push to restore union workers’ rights to deduct their union dues from their annual income tax.

Bodily Autonomy

  • Fran will lead the fight to join other states by preserving abortion access and other forms of reproductive justice in the Wisconsin state constitution.

  • A patient can’t access abortion—or any other form of reproductive care—if they can’t get childcare or time off work. Fran’s universal childcare and paid leave programs will expand the definition of what “reproductive justice” means in Wisconsin.

  • Fran will prevent legal retaliation against medical professionals for providing gender-affirming care and educators for using students' preferred pronouns.

Cannabis

  • It’s simple: Cannabis should be legal. By developing a licensing system like Michigan’s, staffed by regulators familiar with the industry, Fran will finally make this safe recreational and medicinal drug legal in Wisconsin and use the revenue to fund languishing state infrastructure like rural broadband. Fran will also exhaust every resource possible to expand eligibility for expungement, work to get people out of jail, and help get them good-paying jobs in the new industry.

Criminal Legal Reform

  • Fran proudly supports the Conditions of Confinement legislative package, a suite of 17 bills targeted at the state of incarceration in Wisconsin. This package includes:

    • Formally abolishing slavery as a punishment for crimes

    • Access to hygiene products

    • Regular bathing periods

    • Heating and air conditioning

    • Greater supervision and regulatory authority — including public transparency — about what happens in our jails and prisons

  • Everyone has a right to an attorney, but public defenders face overwhelming caseloads that slow down the system. Wisconsin hires far too few public defenders — previous budgets allocated funding for only a quarter of the lawyers needed. Fran’s budgets will listen to the needs of the underfunded and overlooked components of our criminal justice system.

  • Community initiatives like afterschool programs, neighborhood organizations, and public recreation help keep people out of jail. Wisconsin's local governments need state support in designing and implementing comprehensive crime prevention programs.

    Fran sponsored a bill [↗] to make developing these programs easier and will support counties and cities that invest in noncarceral approaches to crime prevention.

  • Fran wants to make sure we do everything possible to keep people who have served their sentence from returning to jail. By investing in reentry programs and wraparound services like mental health treatment and housing support, we can make sure people who leave prison can stay out.

  • We do not serve justice by locking children away for life. 27 states have banned life sentences for juvenile offenders. As governor, Fran will see that Wisconsin follows suit.

Gun Safety

  • Wisconsin is a hunting state, but too many families are terrified of gun violence at school. Fran believes in responsible gun ownership, not military weaponry like assault rifles or bump stocks. Responsible gun ownership requires responsible gun markets, with licensed dealers, background checks, red flag laws, safe storage requirements, reasonable waiting periods, and a ban on sales to domestic abusers.

Environment

  • Our natural resources are not commodities to be sold to the highest bidder — and our energy resources must not be given away to corporate actors at the expense of real people. Fran will demand that investors in any data center, or other corporate investment with extreme energy demands, are responsible for funding commensurate increased clean energy production.

  • Fran is a proud sponsor of the Climate Accountability Act, which requires Wisconsin to create a viable plan to reduce carbon emissions by 52% by 2030 and be carbon-neutral by 2050.

Immigration

  • Fran will use the full force of the executive branch to protect Wisconsinites of all documentation status from secret police. As a cosponsor of the Keep Families Together bill package, she refuses to let Wisconsin’s resources be used to target Wisconsinites — and demands transparency, the right to due process, and the protection of community safe spaces.

Economic Justice

  • Fran authored the Economic Justice Bill of Rights, which calls for:

    1. A job that provides dignity at work and pays a living wage

    2. Adequately funded public education and affordable, accessible child care

    3. A union, public or private, and collective bargaining

    4. Affordable, accessible, and comprehensive high-quality health care

    5. A clean, sustainable environment and healthy planet

    6. Decent, sustainable community infrastructures including safe, affordable housing, transportation, and broadband

    7. Equitable access to capital, investments, financial institutions, and retirement

    8. A fair, restorative, and equitable justice system

    9. Recreation and participation in community and civic life

    10. Life, self-determination, and freedom from oppressions for all Wisconsinites, regardless of documentation status.