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In case you missed it this morning, be sure to check out Adam Linker’s op-ed in this morning’s edition of Raleigh’s News & Observer. As Linker writes:

“Health insurance for more than a million North Carolinians is at stake, and Gov. Pat McCrory has two options: He can take the initiative to protect the people he has sworn to represent or he can sit back and let external forces decide our destiny.

Nearly 560,000 people have signed up for Affordable Care Act plans in North Carolina, and many of them receive tax credits to help pay their premiums. Thanks to outreach efforts by nonprofits, insurers, insurance agents and hospitals, our state ranked fourth in Affordable Care Act signups nationally.

Despite these impressive results, there are still more than 500,000 people, many of them the working poor, who do not qualify for North Carolina’s Medicaid program and who do not earn enough to purchase private insurance. Health reform set aside money for our state to provide this population with coverage through Medicaid, but first state leaders must consent to using these funds for that purpose. So far the governor and state legislature have left the money in Washington.”

Unfortunately, of course, Governor McCrory has failed to act. As Linker explains, however, it’s not too late:

“Now comes the governor’s moment.

He, along with legislative leaders, could change course and circumvent the Supreme Court by re-establishing state control over our insurance marketplace. In fact, most of the pieces are already in place. Our Department of Insurance is proactive about reviewing insurance policies. Our health care and insurance communities meet regularly and could easily form an oversight board. Our outreach and enrollment efforts are national models. All we need is for the governor to work with legislators to vest these organizations with the power to form a state marketplace.

McCrory then could release a state-specific plan to tap federal Medicaid funds to expand coverage to 500,000 additional people. This would boost local economies still staggering from the Great Recession. It would allow tens of thousands of women access to preventive screenings like mammograms and pap smears. It would allow thousands of people suffering from the disease of addiction to obtain the long-term treatment they need. Read More

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McCrory contradictionsGovernor Pat McCrory announced a disastrous and destructive decision yesterday in an interview with an AP reporter. When asked whether he would recommend closing the insurance gap that currently leaves a half-million North Carolinians too poor to qualify for Obamcare subsidies and too well-off to qualify for Medicaid, the Guv said: “I will not make any recommendation as to whether or not we extend insurance for the uninsured until the court case because there are so many ramifications of the court case.”

As the story also noted: “The court’s oral arguments are next month and a ruling is expected in the summer, about when the legislature traditionally seeks to adjourn. That could push any legislative action on a recommendation to 2016.”

This means that a half-million struggling North Carolinians will have to wait at least another year for the health insurance they were promised and deserve. In all likelihood, thousands will die unnecessarily. Meanwhile, tax dollars paid by North Carolinians will flow to other states in which Governors (many of the Republican) have had the vision and courage to put human life ahead of politics.

The decision comes after months of dithering by the Governor and in spite of the clear signals sent by his Department of Health and Human Services officials that Medicaid expansion is both the right thing to do and essential to save lives.

The bottom line: If this is truly is his final word on this matter, Pat McCrory has now, officially, made the worst and most destructive decision of his governorship — a decision that puts supposed concerns about bureaucratic hassles ahead of saving human lives. Meanwhile, millions of people in Ohio and Arizona and other conservative states  enjoy access to decent and affordable health insurance on our nickel. Let’s hope and pray the U.S. Supreme Court does the right thing this summer, but whatever happens then and thereafter, Gov. McCrory has now seized the mantle from former chief naysayer Senator Phil Berger and cemented his legacy as the person who denied decent and affordable health care to a half-million of his fellow Tar Heels unnecessarily.

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Medicaid expansionIn case you missed them while scraping your windshield earlier today, there are two new lead stories  over on the main Policy Watch site today that will be worth a few minutes of your time.

This morning’s Weekly Briefing is an open letter to the one man in North Carolina politics with the clout (and, one hopes, the human decency) to set politics aside and guarantee access to health care for hundreds of thousands of people like Dana Wilson.

Meanwhile, this afternoon’s Fitzsimon File examines what was certainly the strangest claim in GovernorWorkers comp McCrory’s State of the State speech and its apparent origins with a little known administration official who seems to be keeping some odd and perhaps worrisome ties to the private sector.

Commentary
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Photo: WRAL.com

Photo: WRAL.com

As we noted in this space yesterday morning, there were some things to like in Gov. Pat McCrory’s State of the State speech Wednesday evening. For the most part, the Governor sounded more like good ol’ Moderate Mayor Pat rather than the champion of reactionary change who signed some of the nation’s most extreme legislation during his first two years in office.

Still, there were moments when Ebenezer Scrooge McCrory was on display — perhaps most notably when he talked about unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation. In both segments, the Governor’s message was as clear as it was callous and offensive: the Governor believes (and his policies are premised on the notion) that large numbers of North Carolina workers are lazy and don’t want to work.

How else to explain his crowing about having enacted the harshest unemployment insurance cuts in U.S. history and then repeatedly professing a desire to create jobs for all who “want to work”? And if one had any idea that these repeated references were simply an awkward if unnecessary nod to retired folks and, perhaps, the disabled, these were pretty thoroughly trashed when the Governor went off on a lengthy diatribe about how his “examination of workers compensation estimates that 40 percent of workers costs are related to abuse or outright fraud.”

Say what, Governor? Do you really believe that large numbers of people don’t want to work and that that’s why some were surviving on unemployment insurance during the Great Recession? Do you really believe that two out of five worker’s comp claims are bogus?

If so, perhaps you should have checked ahead of time with Rep. Jason Saine. Saine, of course, is the GOP state lawmaker who only managed to get off unemployment insurance by getting elected to the House of Representatives.

Or, perhaps he could have talked with one of the state’s most respected and experienced worker’s comp lawyers — Raleigh’s Leonard Jernigan. As WRAL.com reported this morning: Read More

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McCrory SOS

Photo: WRAL.com

Be sure to check out today’s Fitzsimon File for a more thorough reaction to last night’s State of the State speech. For now, however, here are few preliminary observations:

The good: Pat McCrory can display a winning personality and there’s a reason he’s won a lot of elections. Even with all the mispronunciations and malapropisms, he can be very likeable and sincere. This was on display last night as he related stories about dirty water fountains, his first job as a student teacher and driving on North Carolina highways. He’s not a fat cat or a right-wing ideologue at heart — which partially explains why he’s often so bad at playing those roles on TV. The Governor likes tangible things to fix — which is one of the reasons he’s much better at talking about rehabilitating run down state buildings than discussing large, overarching issues like taxes and health care.

The bad: Unfortunately, the Governor just doesn’t seem to (or doesn’t want to) grasp the enormous gap that exists between his rhetoric (and his espoused ideal of Eisenhower Republicanism) and the policies that he has implemented over the past 25 months. Simply put, a genuine Eisenhower Republican would not have helped impose the most draconian unemployment insurance cuts in American history, enacted huge tax giveaways to the top 1%, denied affordable health insurance to hundreds of thousands of working North Carolinians or presided over the decimation of the state agency charged with protecting our rapidly declining natural environment.

The ugly: The most disappointing moment in the speech came Read More

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