Rep. Denver Riggleman: Bringing Internet to Rural Areas

“If you have to take your kids and you have to go into a parking lot of a library in order to do homework, that is not something that they want to have to deal with.”

Rep. Denver Riggleman represents Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, having been elected in 2018. In this interview, Rep. Riggleman joins Merion West‘s Erich Prince to discuss his efforts to bring better broadband access to rural communities, particularly in Virginia’s Fifth District. Additionally, Rep. Riggleman takes a moment to describe a few other priorities he has been working on during his first year in office, and he also comments on other issues facing those living in rural Virginia, including the opioid crisis.

Before we hop into discussing rural broadband specifically, I wanted to ask you about some of the priorities you outlined in January—during your first couple of days in office—when you first spoke with us. You discussed three major areas of focus for you: healthcare, immigration, and taxes. Now, nine months later—well into your first year in office, how are you seeing these issues now, and where’s your head been when it comes to these priorities?

It’s interesting you ask about that; I was pretty confident that we could do some things—at least present some ideas on these topics. Let’s start with health care; the first thing I did was I put in a bill to switch healthcare pre-existing conditions protection from ACA over to HIPAA. I’m pretty excited about this bill. It’s something that some people had tried to work on during the 115th Congress. We were able to tweak the bill and make it our own because I believe that—if there are attacks on the ACA or if the ACA goes away—one of the good things about ACA—and there isn’t a whole lot of them—was the preexisting conditions protection. So, we have a bill right now that moves preexisting condition protections from the ACA over to HIPAA.