Maine’s governor says No
Maine voters approved Medicaid expansion but the governor says they have to pay for it first.
Voters in Maine approved a ballot measure on Tuesday to allow many more low-income residents to qualify for Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, The Associated Press said. The vote was a rebuke of Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who has repeatedly vetoed legislation to expand Medicaid.
At least 80,000 additional Maine residents will become eligible for Medicaid as a result of the referendum. Maine will be the 32nd state to expand the program under the health law, but the first where voters, not governors or legislators, decided the issue. Other states whose leaders have resisted expanding the program were closely watching the campaign, particularly Utah and Idaho, where newly formed committees are working to get Medicaid expansion on next year’s ballots.
Supporters, including advocacy groups that collected enough signatures to get the question on the ballot, said the measure would help financially fragile rural hospitals, create jobs and provide care for vulnerable people who have long gone without.
Mr. LePage and other opponents, including several Republicans in the state Legislature, said Medicaid expansion would burden the taxpayers and the state budget, and described it as a form of welfare.
“The truth is that Medicaid expansion will just give able-bodied adults free health care,” Mr. LePage said in a recent radio address. “We don’t mind helping people get health care, but it should not be free. ‘Free’ is very expensive to somebody.”
And he’s not letting a little thing like a vote change his mind.
November 8, 2017
For Immediate Release: Wednesday, November 8, 2017
Contact: Julie Rabinowitz, Press Secretary, 207-287-2531AUGUSTA – Governor Paul R. LePage has issued a statement in response to Mainers approving a referendum that will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to give “free” health care to working-age, able-bodied adults, most of whom do not have dependents.
“The last time Maine experimented with Medicaid expansion in 2002 under then-governor Angus King, it created a $750 million debt to hospitals, resulted in massive budget shortfalls every year, did not reduce emergency room use, did not reduce the number of uninsured Mainers and took resources away from our most vulnerable residents—the elderly and the intellectually and physically disabled,” said Governor LePage.
“Credit agencies are predicting that this fiscally irresponsible Medicaid expansion will be ruinous to Maine’s budget. Therefore, my administration will not implement Medicaid expansion until it has been fully funded by the Legislature at the levels DHHS has calculated, and I will not support increasing taxes on Maine families, raiding the rainy day fund or reducing services to our elderly or disabled.”
Vote all you like, peasants; the answer is still no.
When’s he up for re-election? ‘cuz it’s not happening.
LePage is in his second term and not eligible to run for a third in 2018. (Maine apparently does allow governors to have a third term, but not consecutively.)
He got elected both times due to vote-splitting in a multi-candidate field. Maine doesn’t do run-offs if a candidate fails to get a majority; I think there have been some efforts to change that, but not sure how they turned out.
That certainly explains why he thinks this is a good idea.
I like the phrase that gets used in connection with the NHS:
“Free at the point of delivery”
Because it’s not free. We’re all paying for it. Pretending that “voters”, “taxpayers”, and “people getting free healthcare” are all separate entities is just an attempt to divide people into groups and play them off against each other, when actually a lot of people belong to all three of those groups – taxpayers voting to receive free healthcare.
Anyone else find it weird that the newspapers are reporting the results as if it’ll make something happen? I don’t really understand how this works…
Thereby spreading around the cost of healthcare among everyone, making it more affordable for everyone. It’s a win-win, but Repubs can’t see that.
I personally would not be terribly disturbed if my tax dollars paid for cancer treatment for someone I’ve never met, who lives in another state a long way from here, and who happens to be a different race/gender/sexual orientation than myself. And I know that, under a system like that, they would later turn around and pay for my next shoulder replacement. That’s how it works.
But so many of these folks are so worried that “their money” is going to some deadbeat (read: “person of color”) who isn’t worthy of “their money”. Meanwhile, they willingly grab all the government funding for their roads, their farms, their schools, or whatever else they see benefiting them personally.
We are indeed an ugly country.