Dr. Mike Katz brings over forty years of dedicated service to the U.S. healthcare industry, a journey that began as a teenager working as a phlebotomist in New Haven hospitals. His diverse roles have ranged from caring for critically ill children as a pediatric critical care anesthesiologist to managing and advising surgical facilities and health systems, focusing on operational efficiencies and health system integration.
America's healthcare sector, comprising seventeen percent of the nation's GDP, stands as one of the most complex industries. Its sheer size and complexities, coupled with the gravity of life-and-death decisions, defy conventional business models fixated on profit maximization. Yet the current state of America's healthcare is marked by excessive costs, inefficiencies, and fragmentation, lacking coordination among providers and services.
Dr. Katz is steadfast in his commitment to ensuring access to high-quality, affordable healthcare, regardless of zip code. His plan requires a paradigm shift in the focus of America's health system, shifting from treating illness to preventing it by advocating healthy behaviors and lifestyles, starting from the prenatal and early childhood years.
Key Positions
- Guarantee access to high-quality, affordable healthcare for every Delaware family, regardless of location
- Shift the system's focus from treating illness to preventing it, reducing long-term costs for families
- Integrate mental health services into education and community health, treating the whole person
- Break down silos between not-for-profit, academic, and for-profit health systems to enhance choice and efficiency
- Extend care from Wilmington's urban centers to Delaware's rural farmlands, leaving no community behind
Dr. Katz possesses the medical, business, and policy knowledge, experience, and upstream leadership skills necessary to guide the U.S. Senate and Congress in establishing a health system focused on coordinated population and community health. Such a system will provide high-quality, affordable healthcare for every citizen, integrating not-for-profit, academic, and for-profit systems to enhance consumer choice and operational efficiencies.
Delaware's healthcare challenges are acute and local. Prescription drug costs have continued to climb for Delaware families even as major pharmacy chains have reduced their presence in underserved communities. Rural Delaware, particularly Kent and Sussex counties, has long faced shortages of specialists and primary care physicians, forcing families to travel hours for care that residents in Wilmington take for granted. Delawareans pay some of the highest health insurance premiums in the region. Meanwhile, the mental health crisis continues to devastate communities statewide, with insufficient integration between mental health, addiction treatment, and physical care. A U.S. Senator with real healthcare expertise can drive federal policy on drug pricing, rural health funding, and mental health parity in ways a career politician simply cannot.
Dr. Katz is not a politician who learned about healthcare from a briefing. He is a physician, a pediatric critical care anesthesiologist, who has spent four decades inside the system: treating the sickest patients, managing surgical facilities, advising health systems on operations and integration. He understands where costs accumulate, where coordination breaks down, and where federal policy either helps or stands in the way. He is the only candidate in this race who can walk into a Senate committee hearing on healthcare and know, from experience, whether what's being said is true.