While most eyes will be on the race for retiring Republican Indiana Sen. Dan Coats’ seat this year, Kokomo attorney Mark Hurt is eyeing Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly’s seat. Donnelly is not up for re-election until 2018. In 2012, Donnelly beat Republican Richard Mourdock in the November general election after Mourdock, backed by the Tea Party, won over longtime Sen. Richard Lugar in the primary. Hurt has set up an exploratory committee to help him decide if he should run in two years for Donnelly’s seat as a Republican. He is touring all 92 Indiana counties, and stopped in Kosciusko Friday afternoon. He said he was contemplating running for Donnelly’s U.S. Senate seat because he has “real concern” with the direction the country is going and is “very unsettled” with how Donnelly voted on the big issues. “One would be Iran. When I was out in D.C., my former boss, Dan Coats, was two votes short of stopping that. (Donnelly) voted with (Harry) Reid and President Obama,” Hurt said. “For Iran, they’re the main enemy of Saudi Arabia. All the Gulf Arab states up there are very concerned that there’ll be escalations and weapons build up.” Hurt said China and Russia already were sending missiles “and other things” into Iran. Hurt said with the added revenue Iran will have now that the Iran nuclear deal has been approved, “They’re sending a lot of money to Hezbollah in Lebanon, some of the other proxies in Yemen, where they’re trying to take over the country and bring in a more fundamental Islam, and the governing structure where the Quran would be the constitution.” He said all that is very unsettling and he doesn’t feel like “we’re there for our friend Israel, and helping them the way we should. I feel like there’s too much moving over to Syria and Iraq. It’s almost like it’s a peace through weakness, instead of a peace through strength that President Reagan used to talk about.” With the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda in that region, Hurt said, “I think you have to have more focused bombing missions. I think we need more intelligence officers on the ground, and we need some more troops to help our allies – a regional approach there because if we don’t deal with ISIS there, we’ll be dealing with ISIS a lot more here.” Another issue that Hurt brought up, that hits Kosciusko County, is the Medical Device Tax that helps pay for the Affordable Care Act. He said he was “very thankful” there’s a “three-year suspension” of the tax, but “some of the companies, even in Indiana, talked about moving to Ireland because corporate taxes are too high in the U.S.” Hurt said the tax wouldn’t even be a reality if Donnelly hadn’t voted for the Affordable Care Act in the first place. Having done a lot of work in health care, Hurt said, “I think there should be widened access. We haven’t contained costs. The reality is small market insurance premiums have went up 50 percent. They dropped some coverage. I think some of the insurance reforms are good – if people get cancer, they’re guaranteed renewable coverage, they don’t get discriminated against based on a pre-existing condition. I like the idea of subsidies focused for the small businesses.” Hurt said he helped create the Health Savings Account in the early 1990s, working with a friend from Congressman John Kasich’s staff. “We found, working in health care, about 75 percent of the uninsured – they work full time or part time or they’re the spouse or child of that worker, but they’re at a business with less than 50 employees. They don’t have the profit margins to pay for health care,” Hurt said. In the small business market, he said the question is how to provide some incentives and subsidies to help those folks without creating a big government program where there’s a lot of administrative costs. “What you typically see is costs keep rising,” Hurt said. The third issue he brought up as a concern to him was taxpayer-funded abortions. In Donnelly’s past, he wouldn’t have voted for those, but Hurt said Donnelly “broke away” from his past voting record. “I believe in the crisis pregnancy centers and really helping ladies who want to have babies, helping them get teaching skills for parenting. I believe in all that. Encouraging adoption,” Hurt said. Those three issues – Iran, Medical Device Tax, taxpayer-funded abortions – are “some of the main reasons” Hurt said he wants to run for Donnelly’s seat in 2018. “I’m very concerned about an $18 trillion debt. Another issue for me is, you have to work together to solve problems, and people are really divided, and I think people really want some solutions. And people are willing to sacrifice sometimes if they can see it’s going to help everybody, if they work together. So you need those types of solutions,” Hurt said.
