This article originally appeared in Forbes.

A nuclear chemist won the Miss USA 2017 contest. For all the criticism that pageants receive for being too much about beauty and not enough about brains, this should be the headline.

But the new Miss USA is in the news for other reasons. Kara McCullough, from Washington, DC, is facing a backlash for her views on health care and feminism.

Her comments should open the door for a serious conversation about these issues among young people.

When asked if she thought affordable health care is a right or a privilege for U.S. citizens, the 25-year-old scientist at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission answered:

I’m definitely going to say it’s a privilege. As a government employee, I am granted health care. And I see firsthand that for one to have health care, you need to have jobs. So therefore, we need to continue to cultivate this environment that we’re given the opportunities to have health care as well as jobs to all the American citizens worldwide.

This statement that health care is a privilege led to backlash on Twitter.

Beyond the right vs. privilege debate, McCullough is onto something in her statement that shouldn’t be controversial at all. McCullough makes the point that a robust economy is good for all Americans. Americans are better off when the government pursues policies that unleash the economy, rather than stifle it. That’s something all Americans should understand.

And she’s right that currently, health care is tied to jobs for many Americans. Employer-based insurance covered 55.7 percent of the population for part or all of the 2015 calendar year, for example. Health insurance and employment don’t necessarily need to be linked.

Their connection is a legacy of World War II. With a growing demand for labor, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which authorized wage freezes, but specifically excluded, “insurance and pension benefits.” Thus, employers could, and did, use health insurance as part of employee compensation packages to recruit employees. Employment-based health insurance is incentivized by the tax code even to this day. Now, many people don’t give it a second thought that health insurance is tied to employment. But especially young people, like Miss USA, should.

A Gallup poll published last year found that only half of millennials plan to stay with their company one year from now and six in 10 are open to a different job right now. A new job usually means changing health insurance and with that, changing doctors. As Congress rethinks ObamaCare, Miss USA and other young Americans should be arguing for unlinking health insurance from employment to give more people the chance to get, and keep, the health insurance and health care they want.

During the contest, McCullough committed the cardinal sin for women’s rights advocates these days. When asked if she considers herself a feminist, she said:

So as a woman scientist in the government, I’ve liked to lately transpose the word feminism to equalism. I don’t really want to consider myself like this die-hard, you know, like, ‘Oh, I don’t really care about men.’ But one thing I’m going to say is though, women, we are just as equal as men when it comes to opportunity in the workplace. And I say firsthand, I have witnessed the impact that women have in leadership in the medical sciences as well as just in the office environment, so as Miss USA I would hope to promote that type of leadership responsibility globally to so many women worldwide.