DURHAM — Calling the current state of politics "the mother of all illnesses," Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein touted herself as a viable ballot option before a modest crowd at the University of New Hampshire on Tuesday night.

"My background is as a medical doctor, and now I sort of feel like I'm practicing 'political medicine,'" Dr. Stein said. "We've got to fix our sick political system in order to get to everything else that's threatening life and limb and even survival."

Dr. Stein, who is making her second bid for the White House and was recently approved to be on the ballot in New Hampshire, said those "illnesses" include the state of the climate and a bloated military budget. Since the Green Party is not beholden to donations from major corporations, Dr. Stein said, her presidential campaign has the freedom to discuss the aforementioned issues that the other campaigns, in her opinion, do not adequately address.

"We have the unique opportunity to stand up and tell it like it is at a time when the American people are really clamoring for solutions," Dr. Stein said.

Dr. Stein called her proposed stimulus package a "Green New Deal" which would address both the economy and the environment.

"We're not going to choose between one or the other, because they both depend on each other," Stein said. "We can only get them both together. It's a win-win solution."

Weaning America off fossil fuels completely by the year 2030 would create new jobs in the clean-energy sector, Dr. Stein said.

"It's not like we have a choice here," Dr. Stein said. "In addition, it pays for itself. (We) get so much healthier that the savings in health care alone is enough to pay the cost to a green-energy transition."

Limiting ballot choices to just the Democratic and Republican nominees for president does a disservice to voters, Dr. Stein said.

"Hillary (Clinton) and Donald (Trump) have the highest rates of dislike and distrust in any time in our history, for presidential candidates," Dr. Stein said. "People are clamoring for something else. It's the largest bloc of voters now that have divorced the Democratic and Republican parties."

A major plank in of Dr. Stein's platform is to eliminate student-loan debt nationwide, something she said could be done by taxing wealthy Americans or cutting the military budget.

"The military right now is 54 percent of our discretionary budget, but it's not making us safer," Dr. Stein said. "We essentially have a military budget with several footnotes."

Dr. Stein said the cost of forgiving every student loan nationwide would be just a fraction of the cost of what was spent to bail out Wall Street during the financial crisis of 2008.

"The bottom line is that it will cost us $1.5 trillion to (alleviate student-loan debt)," Dr. Stein said. "We came up with, on very short notice, $16 trillion to eliminate the debt of Wall Street after they had essentially crashed the economy with their waste, fraud and abuse. If we came up with that money for them, we can come up with that money for students."