Medicaid giveaway: An exclamation point on a dreadful NC legislative session

[G_j]

http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2015/09/18/medicaid-giveaway-an-exclamation-mark-on-a-dreadful-legislative-session/

The endless 2015 legislative session appears, mercifully, to be nearing a conclusion after nine long months. With the passage of the budget early this morning, legislators are now free to wrap up final details and adjourn for the year. Unfortunately, one of those final details will be giving away the state’s award winning Medicaid program to giant, for-profit insurance companies. As Lynn Bonner reports this morning in Raleigh’s News & Observer:

“Legislators have agreed to privatize North Carolina’s $15 billion Medicaid program, a change that doctors and hospitals have been fighting for months, but which some Republican legislators have championed as a remedy for unpredictable spending.

Under House bill 372, three insurers would be given contracts to offer statewide Medicaid managed care plans. The state would have up to 10 contracts with “provider-led entities,” or groups of doctors and hospitals, that would enroll patients in regional managed care networks.

Rather than pay for each hospital visit or medical procedure as it does now, Medicaid would give the companies a fee for each patient when they enroll. The government would not be liable for cost overruns.”

In many ways. of course, this is a perfectly apt conclusion to the session. The 2015 session opened nine long months ago with one obvious and overriding imperative: North Carolina needed to follow the lead of 30 other states and expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Such an act would have saved thousands of lives per year, pumped billions of dollars into the state’s economy and strengthened an already highly effective program. The state’s feckless governor admitted these facts at times even as he manufactured excuses not to act.

Now, however, the decision has been made to, essentially, do the opposite. Rather than expanding the program to save lives, state leaders will heed the siren song of fat cat corporate lobbyists and give away this enormously valuable public asset to a handful of giant corporations that will, in turn, squeeze profits out of it by denying services to people in need.

The bottom line: More poor people will die, our economy will suffer unnecessarily and wealthy, out-of-state corporations will pad their profits. It’s hard to think of a concluding act that better symbolizes the awful 2015 session.

- See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2015/09/18/medicaid-giveaway-an-exclamation-mark-on-a-dreadful-legislative-session/#sthash.GpvUjSc6.dpuf

[G_j]

1. -

that sucks..

[ladyVet]

2. Well, there goes any hope I had of seeing a doctor any time soon.

Fucking Republicans. The poor stupid shits who voted them in are going to suffer, because most of them are on welfare and need that medicaid, and I'm at the point where I say, they get what they deserve.

[Jim Lane]

3. What are the electoral prospects?

North Carolina is certainly less hidebound conservative than South Carolina. Given the way the Republicans have shown themselves to be RWNJs in governing the state, I have to hope that they'll see at least some backlash at the polls. I realize that gerrymandering insulates them from that to some extent. Nevertheless, do you see any hope that this kind of thing will come back to bite them next year?

[G_j]

4. Good question

Redistricing and voter repression are a serious problem. We hope that efforts by people such as Reverand Barber and the Moral Monday movement will make the difference. These people are seriously destructive and hateful. We fight on.

[struggle4progress]

5. We lost the General Assembly in 2010, which meant Rs got to redistrict

And they gerrymandered like nothing I've ever seen

The reality, during the quarter-century or so I've lived here, is that NC is almost evenly divided D/R, so turn-out really matters. The cause of the 2010 loss, IMO, was the low 2010 turn-out, driven by the I'm-so-disappointed-with-Obama bullshizz that started even before he took office in January 2009

In recent years, Ds have gotten a majority of the votes -- but the screwy gerrymanders produce overwhelming R majorities in the state House and Senate. It'll be hard to beat until the public gets really disgusted with the R craziness