I Can't Wait for Sam Brownback to Try to Screw This Up
Ordinarily, I'd leave this for our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states, except that, holy everlovin' Jesus on a McCormick reaper, it's motherfcking Kansas that's doing this, and that's signifying for a number of reasons-and not all of them centered on the shining banks of the Marmaton River. From The Kansas City Star:
The Kansas Senate voted 25 to 13 to expand KanCare, the state's privatized Medicaid program, after a lengthy debate Monday afternoon. The Senate still needs to give final approval to the measure, which takes advantage of a key provision of Obamacare, in a vote that is expected to come Tuesday. "I can't believe it took this long to do it," said Sen. John Doll, a Garden City Republican. "....This is something that's long overdue." House Bill 2044 would expand health care coverage to an estimated 150,000 people in Kansas. Moderate Republicans and Democrats helped push the bill through the Legislature this session in a stark contrast from past years where expansion efforts failed to gain much traction in either chamber. David Jordan, the executive director of the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, one of the main advocacy groups pushing the bill, said he thinks the "level of support in both chambers reflects the fact that a majority of Kansans support expanding KanCare. … They understand what this means for keeping their local hospital open."
Of course, there's a giant roadblock in the fact that Kansas' governor is still Sam Brownback, a walking Laffer Curve who almost singlehandedly has managed to discredit 40 years of voodoo economics while turning Kansas into a case for which no basket is adequate. Both the proponents and opponents of the expansion believe that he'll veto it when it comes to his desk, because Sam Brownback would light his own head on fire before he'd give up his childlike faith in the Supply Side Fairy.
The Affordable Care Act enabled states to expand Medicaid, which provides health coverage to the disabled and low-income families, to cover people who earn too little to buy insurance through the federal health care exchange but also earn too much to otherwise qualify for Medicaid. "To expand Obamacare when the program is in a death spiral is not responsible policy," Melika Willoughby, Brownback's spokeswoman, said in a statement as the Senate kicked off debate on the bill.
Blah, blah, death spiral, blah. Nothing would please me more than to see the Kansas legislature override Governor Sam's veto. (Based on the vote on the expansion itself, the proponents are two votes short in the state senate.) Nonetheless, just putting this bill on Brownback's desk indicates a sea change on a number of levels.
First, the debacle overseen in Washington by the president* and Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, has had wide-ranging ripple effects. The opposition to the Medicaid expansion in Kansas depended vitally on some kind of healthcare deal passing in Washington that undid the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid provisions. When that effort cratered, the opposition in Kansas had no serious argument left.
Second, the underlying premise of the Affordable Care Act-namely, that the way we used to do healthcare in this country was hopelessly screwed and that it's time for the United States to progress, however fitfully, towards the kind of health-care enjoyed by the rest of the industrialized world-has taken deep root among the people out in the country. Healthcare as a basic human right (Thanks, Bernie!) is becoming something that you mess with at your political peril, even in Kansas. It even is becoming immune to the typical conservative attack on the concept of a social safety net: that Those People are picking your pocket. Medicaid expansion benefits mainly those people whose political power is otherwise limited, but Kansas just voted for more of it, not less.
Third, hell, man, it's Kansas. What more do you want?
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