[Vision2020] The death toll Idaho Republicans can accept

[Tom Hansen]

Here's a simple three-word suggestion . . . Give a damn!

Courtesy of today's (July 7, 2014) Lewiston Tribune.

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The death toll Idaho Republicans can accept
Marty Trillhaase
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney carried 69 percent of the people represented by Idaho House Majority Leader Mike Moyle, R-Star.
Senate Health and Welfare Committee Chairman Lee Heider, R- Twin Falls, serves a legislative district that voted 66.5 percent for Romney.
Sen. Steven Thayn, R-Emmett, stands for election in a district that went for Romney by more than 67 percent.
And House State Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Loertscher, R-Iona, is the legislative face of a district that voted 81 percent for Romney.
All four were recently grafted onto a task force that ostensibly is looking into how to expand Medicaid coverage to Idaho's poorest citizens.
Although Loertscher has embraced that idea, Moyle, Heider and Thayn have not.
"There's no desire to touch this thing," Moyle told The Associated Press.
"People don't want Medicaid expansion," Heider told IdahoReporter.com.
What's the Romney connection?
The man their constituents overwhelmingly supported for president made a case for Medicaid expansion so compelling it's hard to believe anyone in Idaho would stand in its way.
Although he ran away from the fact during his presidential bid, Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, presided over a health care expansion virtually identical to the reform package President Obama and the Democratic Congress adopted.
Romneycare mandated health insurance and provided help, including Medicaid expansion, for low-income individuals.
It became the largest experiment with universal health care coverage in the country.
The results are in: During Romneycare's first four years, the death toll in Massachusetts dropped 3 percent. Extrapolated across the U.S., that would mean about 17,000 fewer deaths each year.
It only makes sense.
People who have health insurance get preventive care - such as early cancer screenings and immunizations.
Insurance allows them to better manage chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
Coverage means people who need mental health treatment get it - which translates into a drop in the suicide rate.
More than 76,000 Idahoans secured private health insurance under the exchange program Obamacare created. About 92 percent of them received some kind of subsidy.
But another 80,000 Idaho adults make too little money to qualify for the exchange program. Obama intended for them to receive Medicaid and his program offered to cover 100 percent of the costs for the first three years and never less than 90 percent thereafter
Financially, the move would save Idaho taxpayers about $90 million a year:
$35 million spent through the property tax-supported county medically indigent program.
$35 million allocated to the state Catastrophic Health Care program.
$20 million needed to provide health care to state prison inmates.
Unwilling to be tainted by Obamacare, lawmakers such as Moyle and Thayn have been willing to throw that money away.
But what about lives?
A 3 percent drop in Idaho's death rate would save 450 people each year - about three times more than advocates of Medicaid expansion had hoped.
What about those 450 real Idahoans?
Are they to be sacrificed year after year on the altar of ideological purity?
Ordinary Idahoans - those who voted for Romney and those who didn't - should ask the people they've sent to Boise that very question.
And they ought to do it before returning them to Boise. - M.T.

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Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
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