Friday, December 7, 2018

No more studies. Just expand Medicaid


At first, it looks good, as good as that tantalizing piece of cheese on a mousetrap looks to the hungry rodent. That would be the news that the Wyoming legislature is considering a “top to bottom” study of healthcare in Wyoming.

Among lawmakers, studies have always been employed to avoid doing what everyone already knows should be done. By now, everyone not a Republican member of the Wyoming legislature knows what should be done. Hundreds of studies have already been done. Medicaid should be expanded in Wyoming as it has been in 37 states including all of those red and purple states surrounding us except South Dakota.

The man placing the cheese on this trap led the fight to keep Wyoming isolated from states that figured out Medicaid expansion solves many of the problems all states share when it comes to providing access to and controlling the costs of healthcare. State Senator Charlie Scott has proclaimed himself the leading legislative expert on the matter, often using alternative facts to sway colleagues too lazy to study the matter for themselves.

Now, Senator Scott says Wyoming needs another study. The failure of Wyoming to do that which lawmakers and voters in all those other states have done is a monument to a legislator who has been around too long.

Charlie Scott was first elected to the legislature when Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. He has not aged well in the job but has accrued a great deal of power to impact the process and he knows the tricks of the trade. When Charlie proposes a “study,” what he’s really planning is another cover up of the facts in order to validate his long-standing opposition to Medicaid expansion.

When the Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee met recently, he rolled out his plan for the study. He began by identifying the problem as he sees it. Among them is the fact that many consumers travel to other states for care, depriving Wyoming of that economic investment in our healthcare infrastructure. Before his proposed study even begins, Scott has a solution, which will undoubtedly find its way into the consultant’s list of recommendations. He would “force” you to stay in Wyoming for medical care, restricting your choices.

Studies of the impact of Medicaid expansion already answer that question. The Kaiser Foundation analyzed 202 studies of what happens when states expand Medicaid. Those states experience budget savings, revenue gains, and economic growth.

Did you hear that? There have already been more than 200 studies. The “Charlie Scott Memorial Healthcare Study” will add nothing new. Instead of relying on one lawmaker whose wrong-headed opinion is carved in stone, perhaps the other 89 members of the legislature could read at least a few of those studies and compare their results with Charlie’s averments.

In the years leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Scott told his colleagues it would never become law. After it passed he assured them the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional. When the high court found it was not unconstitutional, Charlie told them the feds would never keep their promise to pay the lion’s share of the costs of expansion. Now that the feds have kept that promise, even as the current president does his best to ruin the ACA, Charlie falsely claims Medicaid expansion will bust our budget. The experiences of those other 37 states demonstrate Charlie was as wrong about that as he has been all along.

But, the man who would be legislator for life, wants two more years to study the issue, two more years during which low-income families will continue to suffer from a lack of affordable healthcare while Charlie Scott uses taxpayer dollars to guide the results of a study to more of his ill-considered and erroneous conclusions.

Charlie has set the trap and placed the cheese in front of his colleagues. They have taken it before. The question is whether they learned from prior mistakes.







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