The Friday Follies
Published January 15, 2016
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, January 15, 2015.
Another state expands Medicaid while McCrory does nothing
One of the more underreported stories of this week came from Louisiana where new Governor Jon Bel Edwards signed an executive order expanding Medicaid in his state, providing health care to 300,000 low-income adults.
Louisiana becomes the 31st state to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, many of them led by Republicans who tailored their expansion to their state and their conservative philosophy. Expansion is also gaining support of Republican leaders in places like Alabama and Wyoming.
But not North Carolina, where Governor Pat McCrory has yet to develop a plan even though expansion would provide health care coverage for 500,000 people in the state and create thousands of jobs and help struggling hospitals, many of them in rural areas.
McCrory talked for a while about coming up with an expansion proposal but never did and hasn’t mentioned it lately.
Legislative leaders remain adamantly opposed, showing again that they dislike President Obama more than they care about helping half a million people in their own state.
It’s not clear what Gov. McCrory thinks.
More spin about McCrory’s abortion pledge
Speaking of Gov. McCrory, his staff tried again this week to come up with a way to square his support of new restrictions on abortion services passed by the General Assembly last year with his 2012 campaign pledge that he would not sign legislation that imposed new restrictions.
A Sunday New York Times story focused on the new law in North Carolina that took effect in October that imposes a 72-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion and requires doctors who perform abortions after the 16th week of pregnancy to send an ultrasound to the state, a stunning invasion of privacy and an obvious effort to intimidate doctors.
The new waiting period also makes North Carolina an outlier. Only four other states force women to wait as long to receive the legal medical procedure.
McCrory was asked directly in a 2012 debate what additional abortion restrictions he would support and he answered with one word, “none.”
That doesn’t leave much wiggle room but folks in McCrory’s office have been wiggling anyway. A spokesman told New York Times that the law “includes common-sense measures aimed at protecting women’s health by ensuring medical professionals use proper safety precautions, and this commitment is consistent with the governor’s pledge.”
The governor’s pledge was to support no more restrictions on abortion services. The bill he signed imposed new restrictions on abortion services. Folks can agree with the law or disagree with it but it’s impossible to see it as anything other than imposing new restrictions on women seeking abortions, something McCrory vowed he wouldn’t do.
Something Obama and Reagan agree on
Lost in all the partisan reactions to President Obama’s State of the Union Address this week was his call for something that many Republicans used to favor and some still do, an end to gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts.
Obama mentioned it as part of his call for a better politics in America and it’s not the first time he’s talked about it. And he is hardly the first president to bring it up.
Another champion of redistricting reform was Ronald Reagan. In his last televised interview as president, Reagan told David Brinkley that there was a great conflict of interest to allow politicians to draw the district lines under which they run for election.
Surely something that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama agree on is worth pursuing in North Carolina.
A message on poverty for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
And finally as North Carolina celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. here are two quotes from King that are truer today than in 1968 when he said them.
Wouldn’t it be something if the political leaders who are making speeches praising King this weekend would take these words to heart?
“Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working everyday? They are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen. And it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.”
“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”
That is the real question indeed.
January 15, 2016 at 10:27 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Bad idea to take those households whose income is between 100% and 138% of poverty and kick them out of the ACA Marketplace and force them into a very flawed Medicaid program. Households in this income range in States that did not expand Medicaid are able to purchase quality healthcare insurance using the Marketplace premium tax credit/subsidy and participate in the Cost Share Reduction program which leaves them will very low out of pocket costs. Medicaids low reimbursement rates has lead many providers to not participate or several restrict their Medicaid patient load resulting in inferior healthcare for Medicaid patients. A far better solution would have been for Congress in 2010 when passing the ACA to have not placed the lower income limit on the Marketplace premium tax credit/subsidy and Cost Share Reduction program so that all low income households would have access to quality Marketplace healthcare insurance and then the flawed Medicaid program could have been eliminated.
