If you have ever faced a serious health threat or have a chronic condition, you know that treatment and the road to recovery can be complicated.

If I had one wish for the future of health and health care, it would be a simple one. Lawmakers and agency policymakers would use evidence to develop public policy. Policy decisions and resource allocation would be driven by data and prioritized by long-term return on investment.

The Pew Foundation and its allies of convenience want the Legislature to green light “dental therapists.” They say this will improve dental health care for poor and rural Arizonans. Yet these dental therapists, empowered to do irreversible surgeries such as pulling teeth, will have minimal training – nothing at all like what dentists, pediatric dentists and oral surgeons receive before they see their first patient.

Nurses exist to help patients – that’s our top priority. So, when we look at the state of health care in 2017, it’s through the lens of whether it is getting easier or harder for patients to access the care they need. The answer is, it’s a mixed bag. Arizona nurses are playing a more prominent role in providing safe, quality care. But not all of the news is good; uncertainty swirls around health care policy in Arizona and nationally.

It may sound ridiculous to remind everyone that we only have one body, with many parts. Yet we’ve created a system of health care that serves distinct parts carved out from each other – mind, body, teeth. This fragmentation has created a maze of confusion.

Our state has already enabled innovative care models, such as Direct Primary Care practices and Health Care Sharing Ministries. By lifting the regulatory burdens that create barriers to health care choice, these models have met the needs of thousands in Arizona, and the number of participants is growing annually.

Called KidsCare in Arizona, CHIP now covers more than 23,000 children across our state. It has helped bring the rate of Arizona children with health insurance to a historic high at 92.7 percent. Instead of celebrating, families have been thrown into uncertainty as the fate of their children’s health care hangs in the balance.

We must pay more to attract physicians and specialists who may otherwise prefer to work in the Phoenix or Tucson areas. Personnel expenses now account for 75 percent of our total operational costs, and we have been recruiting for another primary care physician to join our team for the past two years.

Rep. Maria Syms, R-Paradise Valley, is requesting that Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issue a formal opinion regarding the legality of what she described as the “excessive” and “disproportionate” sewer rates being charged to Paradise Valley residents by the city of Phoenix.

Tim Jeffries, director of the Department of Economic Security, broke no laws in emailing agency staffers about his trip to Lourdes and offering to take their written “special intentions” to the holy grotto, the Attorney General’s Office concluded on Aug. 11.