Election Results Invigorate Medicaid Expansion Hopes
November 9, 2017 by admin
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Neither does Kansas, where the Republican-controlled Legislature voted to expand Medicaid earlier this year but failed to override a veto by Gov. Sam Brownback. Mr. Brownback is awaiting confirmation to an ambassador at large position in the Trump administration, but Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, a fellow Republican who would replace him, has also indicated he would resist expansion.
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Still, David Jordan, who leads the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, an advocacy group, pointed out that if Mr. Colyer becomes governor, he will face re-election a year from now in a state where polls have found resounding support for expanding Medicaid.
“Yesterday’s results in Virginia and Maine should send a message to him,” Mr. Jordan said. “It could become really tough to go against this wave.”
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But for many Republican politicians, the idea of expanding Medicaid remains hard to love. Providing government insurance coverage to poor adults who are not disabled is anathema to many. They view such help as discouraging work, though data suggests most new Medicaid recipients have jobs and states that expanded did not see reductions in employment among low-income people.
Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the program, told state Medicaid directors on Tuesday that her department would begin approving state plans to condition Medicaid coverage for non-disabled adults on work or volunteer hours.
“Believing that community engagement requirements do not support or promote the objectives of Medicaid is a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration,” Ms. Verma said. “Those days are over.”
Several states have asked Ms. Verma’s office for permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. Matt Salo, the executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, said that he thought work requirements might make expansion more acceptable to some state legislatures, like Florida’s, that have been reluctant in the past. “You can rebrand that,” he said. “You can do that very effectively.”
The federal government paid the entire cost of expanding Medicaid for the first three years of Obamacare, but that changed this year. States now must pay 5 percent of the new beneficiaries’ medical bills, a proportion that will increase to 10 percent by 2020. So any state that expands now will need to find some funding to pay for its share.
States that expanded Medicaid expect to spend $8.5 billion from their own funds on expansion in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.
“Every political decision is about value, and the value is what’s the return for the money,” said Tony Keck, a former director of South Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, a state that has not expanded. Mr. Keck, now a hospital executive, said that legislators there thought it was more important to invest in existing populations of Medicaid beneficiaries than to expand the program to cover childless adults.
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In Utah, a newly formed political committee called Utah Decides Healthcare just concluded seven required public hearings around the state and hopes to soon start gathering the 113,143 signatures needed to get an expansion question on next year’s ballot. The Republican-controlled legislature could interfere if the initiative were to pass, but RyLee Curtis, the campaign manager for the Utah effort, said she doubted it would because Gov. Gary Herbert and the State Senate had tried to expand Medicaid in the past.
Jonathan Schleifer, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a left-leaning group founded in California that donated nearly $700,000 to the pro-expansion campaign in Maine, said the group was eager to help the efforts in Utah and Idaho and scout out other states where ballot initiatives might work.
“Grassroots groups in other states were waiting to see what happened last night and now they know what’s possible,” said Mr. Schleifer, his voice hoarse from whooping at a victory party in Maine on Tuesday night. “In the next couple weeks we’ll be able to start talking about what other states have the ability to run these initiatives and the grassroots enthusiasm to do that.”
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Donna Brazile on campaign tell-all: ‘I wanted the American people to see what happened’
November 9, 2017 by admin
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Donna Brazile: My book tells some hard truths
Part 1: Former interim DNC chair addresses claims that the Democratic National Committee slanted the nomination in favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, dysfunction in the Clinton campaign and more. #Tucker
Former interim head of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile appeared to back away Wednesday from some of the most sensational claims made in her recently released tell-all about last year’s presidential election.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Brazile described her book as a “forensic examination” of the failures of the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“I wanted to write this book to tell my story,” Brazile told host Tucker Carlson of her memoir, called “Hacks.” “I wanted the American people to see what happened.”
During a wide-ranging interview, Brazile said she leaked questions at a Democratic primary town hall to members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign because she didn’t want the candidates to be “blindsided.”
“That’s the greatest spin I’ve ever heard” Carlson laughed in response. “I didn’t want them blindsided? That’s so good, you should do this for a living. That is hilarious.”
“Wikileaks sought to divide us,” Brazile responded. “These were active measures where you got to see the things I gave to Hillary. You never got a chance to see the things I gave to [Sen.] Bernie [Sanders] or [former Maryland Gov.] Martin O’Malley.”
Previously released excerpts from Brazile’s book accused Clinton’s top male campaign staffers of sexist treatment. But on Wednesday night, Brazile ascribed her conflicts with campaign manager Robby Mook to “generational” differences.
“Remember, I come from the old school,” Brazile said. “I come from the school [where] you actually knock on doors, you talk to people, you try to get their support [and] then you try to get them out on Election Day. Robby comes from a school that is a lot different … they do algorithms, they do data modeling.”
Brazile called the Clinton campaign “condescending and dismissive” toward her and complained that she didn’t have total control of the party’s resources.
Another excerpt from Brazile’s book that has been made public accused her predecessor as DNC chair – Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz – of indulging in costly perks, including a “chief of staff and a body woman,” even as the party wrestled with a cash crunch that left it dependent on the Clinton campaign.
But on Wednesday, Brazile defended Wasserman Schultz’s handling of the DNC’s hacking that resulted in the release of a trove of emails by Wikileaks last summer.
“When [the hack] was brought to her attention, she immediately reached out to get cybersecurity experts on board … along with our cyber attorney, they provided the FBI with everything that they requested.”
When Carlson pressed her on why the DNC did not turn over its servers to the FBI, Brazile answered, “we were still running a party,” adding that the party spent “over $60,000” to assist the hacking investigation.
“After I received my FBI briefing in August, do you know what I wanted to do?” Brazile asked Carlson. “I wanted to go over to the Pentagon. I didn’t want to go back to the DNC. I wanted somebody to put yellow tape around the DNC. I was scared. We were under attack.”