North Dakota Dems Endorse Schneider for Insurance Commissioner

Article

Jasper Schneider remembers attending Democratic conventions as a small boy with his father, John, a former House Democratic leader and U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration.

On Friday, the 28-year-old was on stage himself, beginning his first statewide campaign for insurance commissioner, saying he would use the job to encourage health insurance coverage for children and push for oversight of North Dakota’s workers’ compensation agency.

“We need to keep finding ways to bring about affordable and quality health care for all North Dakotans, starting with our children,” he said. “We have upwards of 15,000 kids in North Dakota who go about their day, every single day, without health coverage. In my mind, that is 15,000 too many.”

Schneider spoke to more than 700 Democratic convention delegates and a steadily increasing number of people in the Alerus Center’s football seats, who were filing in to hear later speeches by Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

About 6,000 people were in the stands when Schneider began his acceptance speech. One group began waving large individual letters, spelling out O-B-A-M-A, as Schneider finished his address.

“This is a little bigger crowd than I’m used to speaking to,” said one of Schneider’s nominating speakers, state Rep. Shirley Meyer, D-Dickinson.

Schneider, a Fargo attorney, was elected to the North Dakota House in 2006. He is in the middle of his first four-year term.

He is opposing Republican Adam Hamm, a former Fargo attorney and county prosecutor whom Gov. John Hoeven appointed to the job last October. Hamm succeeded Jim Poolman, who resigned to begin his own insurance consulting business.

Schneider represents injured workers in legal disputes with the Workforce Safety and Insurance agency, which provides workers’ compensation coverage for businesses.

He and Hamm both support proposals that would allow the state Insurance Department to license and regulate the agency, which has been in frequent turmoil during the past two years.