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.

“Howard Zinn and Lois Mottonen Fistfight in the Equality State,"

“Howard Zinn and Lois Mottonen Fistfight in the Equality State.”

That’s the title of my fourth book, released on the first anniversary of Lois’s death. Her memoir is published by WordsWorth Publishers of Cody, Wyoming. The book is available be emailing me at rmc81448@gmail.com or at https://wordsworthpublishing.com/catalog/

This remarkable woman called me in 2014. She read my book “Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt.” Lois wanted me to write a book for her. Lois didn’t have a clear vision. She was generally thinking of a book about the lives of women in Wyoming.

I declined, believing a book about Wyoming women ought to be written by a woman.

Lois called again, in 2016, this time more certain. The older she got, the more anguished she became about the lives of woman, racial and cultural minorities in what is euphemistically called “the Equality State.” She wanted to tell their stories.

Her grandparents emigrated from Finland in the late 1800s. She grew up during the Depression and World War II. Lois lived in the old mining camp, Winton, and attended school in Rock Springs before heading to the University of Wyoming.

Despite graduating with honors and becoming the second Wyoming woman to earn an accountancy certificate, Lois found firms in Cheyenne or Denver unwilling to hire a woman.

Between Lois and her family, the Mottonen’s lived in Wyoming from the beginning. She was offended by the effort of the 2^nd Territorial Legislature to repeal the right to vote given women by the 1^st Territorial Legislature. She celebrated Nellie Tayloe Ross’s being elected first woman governor but bemoaned that a woman was never again permitted to serve.

Lois was outraged by the Black 14 incident and the murder of Matthew Shepard and the unwillingness of Wyoming politicians to enact a hate crimes law. Having been victimized by employer discrimination, she was appalled by the wage gender gap.

Lois was looking for a writer who shared her belief that calling Wyoming “the Equality State” doesn’t make it so.

For nearly two years, Lois and I met every Monday afternoon. I listened. She told her story and the stories of her parents and grandparents, telling of their struggles, connecting her personal experiences to the stories of tens-of-thousands of Wyoming people who are kicked to the curb because of their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or other characteristics that don’t line up with the contrived cowboy image to which many want to cling.

Lois wanted Howard Zinn the tell the story. He wasn’t available. So, she asked me.

“Howard Zinn…meet Wyoming.” Professor Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present,” is an honest look at U.S. history, the sort of which Lois wanted for Wyoming. Sherman Alexie’s classic, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,” provided readers a glimpse into the importance of symbols and images in building a non-existent reality. It seemed appropriate to carve this book’s title from those.

“Howard Zinn and Lois Mottonen Fistfight in the Equality State,” attempts a Zinn-like history of how Wyoming’s women, working people, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities are treated, posing the troubling question Alexie asked in his poem entitled “Hymn.”

            But, how much do you love the strange and the stranger?

               Hey, Caveman, do you see only danger

                  When you peer into the night? Are you afraid

                     Of the country that exists outside your cave?

                        Hey, Caveman, when are you going to evolve?

                           Are you still afraid of the way the earth revolves

                              Around the sun and not the other way around?

                                 Are you terrified of the ever-shifting ground?

In November 2017, Lois was diagnosed with a brain tumor and left this world on December 6 before this book could be published. She had, however, read the draft and approved of it. Afterward, she smiled and said, “You know, you and I are going to catch a lot of hell over this book.”

It would be a tribute to her if we did.

War trophies of an embarrassing past

The Bells of Balangiga are going home, where they belong. In spite of the chauvinism of Wyoming’s Congressional delegation, a decades-old debate about where the bells belong has ended. The dictionary notes apt synonyms for “chauvinism” include jingoism and excessive nationalism.

Unlike Wyoming politicians, Defense Secretary James Mattis rejected chauvinism and made the ethical choice, coming to Cheyenne to announce his decision. Mattis’s decision conflicts with the position of many veterans’ organizations, though his respect of veterans is unquestionable.

To his credit, Governor Matt Mead, who opposed repatriation of the bells, admitted Mattis has a perspective and an understanding of history “that is broader than mine.” As war trophies go, a thoughtful perspective and understanding of history leads most to believe that as long as they remain in the U.S., the bells are trophies of an embarrassing chapter in America’s ugly imperialistic past.

Our nation’s politically-polarized psyche results in part from the inability of many Americans to understand their life experience is not the same as those on the other side of a debate or controversy. Those who believe these bells are sacred U.S. war trophies should consider the Philippine side of the story as to how they ended up here in the first place.

In August a dozen years ago, a news correspondent for a popular Filipino investigative news program came to Wyoming to do a story on the bells from his country’s perspective. Listen to how his countrymen and women view the history.

It was “September 28, 1901, during the Spanish-American War. The Philippines then was at the last stretch of Spanish colonial administration and the Americans were already ruling the whole country.”

That raises the question. “What was the U.S. was doing in the Philippines?” Historian Michael Beschloss’s “Presidents of War” documents the American quest for empire, new commercial markets and opportunities to convert “heathens” to Christianity as motives for invading and occupying that small island nation.

Mercado continues, “According to the tale of the Balangigans, various types of abuse were experienced by them at the hands of the Americans, from stealing to inflicting physical pain.” Mercado says it was these abuses by U.S. occupiers that caused the people to plan an attack on the Americans.

“The plan,’ he reported, ‘was for all the males to gather inside the church, to hide arms [i.e., bolos] inside coffins, and to dress in women’s clothing so that they would not be noticed. The next morning, while the Americans were eating breakfast, the bell of the church rang. This signaled the attack.

“The Filipinos had no other weapons but bolos and knives, but this battle was recognized by history as the worst defeat of the Americans in the war here.”

Mercado’s report describes American retaliation. “They revenged (sic) and burned the entire town of Balangiga and its neighboring towns. This chapter in history is called ‘kill and burn’ and it was enforced by Brig. Gen. Jacob Smith. His order: ‘Make Samar into a howling wilderness…and kill all males 10 years old and above.”

It was a vengeful massacre of the people of Balangiga for which these bells became an American “war trophy,” eventually finding their way to Warren Air Force Base.
As a State Senator in the 1970s, I lobbied for the return of the bells to the Philippines. I thought then and I continue to believe that our country’s values are realized more by its generosity toward other nations than by the exercise of chauvinistic bullying over them.

In the U.S, the bells are jingoistic symbols of a history that 21^st century Americans should regret, a history we have thankfully moved beyond. In the Philippines, these bells symbolize the patriotic courage of their ancestors.

A part of our most recent history with the Philippines includes fighting side-by-side in World War II and Vietnam and the role Filipinos play today as allies in an important part of the world. Wyoming politicians don’t have to take that broad a perspective, though they should and Secretary Mattis did.