McCollum and Ryan square off over the rising cost of tuition and insurance

Fourth District incumbent Betty McCollum and challenger Greg Ryan were in studio for a debate. They talked about health care, policing and race, and the economy.

The 4th District includes St. Paul and its suburbs east to the St. Croix River, including Woodbury, Lake Elmo and Stillwater.

McCollum has represented the area in Congress since 2001. The Democrat is running for another two-year term this election cycle.

Ryan, her GOP opponent, wowns and operates Ryan Plumbing and Heating with his family in St. Paul.

To hear the entire debate, use the audio player above.

On the economy

McCollum:

"The federal government should be working in partnership with businesses, with our college system to make sure that we have not only children who graduate from high school ready to participate fully in the workforce ... or if they go to college ... that they not be in so much in a debt burden at the end of it ... and that they won't have the same opportunities that their parents had for successful family life."

Ryan:

"A lot of everything that we buy and almost every aspect of our life is attached to some sort of a regulatory concern that originates out of the federal government and then leads it way on down to the state and local level. I just really believe that the economy can be lifted much more if the government steps out of the way. "

On education and college debt

Ryan:

"Yes the federal government should do something about [college debt]. It should eliminate the Department of Education. We need to get it back to where it fundamentally was before. When the government interjects into the financial play of the schooling, the institutions systematically raise their rates for tuition."

McCallum:

"I do want to agree with Mr. Ryan on one thing ... some of the game playing with how dollars are expended with the federal government is something that I became very interested in, and worked on a piece of legislation with some of my colleagues to say when the federal government is helping families and students be able to afford education and advanced degrees ... that we're going to hold states and schools accountable as not using that as an excuse to raise tuition."

On insurance premiums increasing

McCollum:

"There are some really good things in the Affordable Care Act, so repealing it is not what we need to do. We know what we need to do. We need to hold the pharmaceutical companies accountable for all the price increases. Governor Dayton has come up with a great solution of how we can do a bridge gap and go back and fix some of these adjustments that need to be done. And one of the ways we can do that is through a public option. But when the only option I have is to just repeal and not to go in and fix, that's frustrating for me and frustrating for the many Minnesotans who now feel themselves caught in this premium increase."

"But the only alternative I've been given by my Republican colleagues who set what bills come to the floor and what amendments are allowed is straight repeal, and I'm not going to go back to a system in which people were denied preexisting condition coverage"

Ryan:

"Obamacare is hiding a lot of the actual true costs through administrative costs. We have a lot of our premiums that are just going right into the administrative costs. It's just too large for us citizens. We need to call our providers, find out what the cost is, and then proceed. We're disconnecting the raw cost of the procedure from the customers."

"We need to connect the free market into the health insurance industry. We have limitations on where we can buy and what insurance companies can actually conduct business in each individual state. And we really need to remove those restrictions and let the general public shop for the policy that fits their needs."

On the federal government's involvement with local policing

Ryan:

"The federal government needs to stay out of the implementation of law enforcement. These people are trained and they take tests and they're certified to be law enforcement personnel. And then we want our Department of Justice and all of the other federal agencies to come in and rewrite the rule book. It's tough for a law enforcement official to go out there and try to make sure that he enforces the law, when he knows that if he does his job he might subject to a lawsuit."

McCollum:

"I agree that the federal government shouldn't be involved in the local policing. But the federal government does have a role with the Department of Justice when we see happening around the country where the police haven't had good training. Where there hasn't been an audit. Where there hasn't been a review conducted to make sure that when someone is pulled over for a traffic ticket the officer or deputy comes back home to their family, and the person who has been pulled over for that traffic violation also comes home to their family."