A GOP health care scam flops even harder than expected
Ted Cruz takes a huge L, too
Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report.
First, thank you to everybody who commented and discussed Saturday’s newsletter on Israel, Gaza, and the American sociopolitical response. Both the comments section and the emails directly to me were thoughtful and considered, no matter the opinion they offered.
In tonight’s newsletter, we’re turning our focus back to domestic affairs, catching up on important health, election, and voting rights news, among other topics. Plus, a bit of fun at the end.
Before we start, one quick thing: The price of a premium subscription to Progress Report hasn’t increased since 2019. Sadly, that’s become untenable. Between increased processing fees and Substack’s cut, I lose 20% right off the top, while inflation has reduced the value of each payment another 20%.
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Heath Care, Medicaid, and Moral Relativity
Fewer than 1400 people have enrolled in Georgia limited Medicaid expansion with work requirements since it launched on July 1, it was revealed over the weekend.
That’s a humiliating and infuriating number, given the state’s problems and the projections by Gov. Brian Kemp’s office. There are 370,000 uninsured people in Georgia, and the state has said that it wants to enroll 90,000 of them during the first two of its “Pathways” program (which sounds more like a celebrity rehab facility than public insurance program).
The state will have to change almost everything about enrolling and eligibility to get anywhere near the modest goal number. There’s one very easy fix, in fact, but Georgia has the third-highest uninsured rate in the nation because its leaders are so against full expansion that they would simply rather watch people grow sick, suffer, and die.
Georgia is not alone; there are ten states spread across the South and Midwest that have not expanded Medicaid, collectively denying health care coverage to an estimated 2.3 million people. The ten states consistently have the worst key health outcomes, from both maternal and infant mortality to poor management of chronic conditions. They have the highest uninsured rate in the country and have experienced more rural hospital closings than anywhere else. The full scorecard released by the Commonwealth Fund this summer is grim, and will look even worse next year.
Activists, lobbyists, and Democratic lawmakers have fought for more than a decade to convince GOP majorities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming to opt into the program. In each state, the response has been the same time and time again: It costs too much money.
It’s a preposterous argument, belied by basic math: The federal government pays 90% of what it costs to insure and provide care for the people whose income is between the state’s initial cutoff and the federal cutoff, which is 138% of the poverty rate.
The refusal is entirely ideological, a rigid relic of Republicans’ reflexive hatred of anything associated with Barack Obama. The states aren’t just giving up free money and potential revenue increases; as this recent story in Stateline describes, legislators in the 10 states have tried various approaches and passed a patchwork of policies, from upping payments to hospitals to extending care for new mothers. The federal government doesn’t incentivize those measures in the same way, so they are far less fiscally conservative for states to pursue than expansion itself.
Extending Medicaid for new mothers for up to a year is one of the most popular of those quarter-measures, celebrated as proof of some new awakening after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and those states swiftly moved to ban abortion. It passed in Florida and Georgia last year and in Texas this past June, but right now, those states are focused on kicking as many people off Medicaid as they can as part of the unwinding process, with few resources afforded to those seeking to enroll in the program.
I’ve gotten to know one such pregnant woman who lives in Georgia while working on a story about the unwinding for More Perfect Union. She was improperly removed from Medicaid this summer and has reapplied twice, each time providing all the tests and paperwork required to prove to that she’s pregnant to the state.
The phone lines are jammed, her case worker’s voicemail box is closed, and she’s now 10 weeks pregnant and yet to see an OB because she lives in a rural area and doesn’t have insurance. I connected her with a state senator who has been working to make things right, and while the senator was able to get her food stamps reauthorized, the Medicaid is still an issue nearly two weeks later.
Republicans in all ten non-expansion states have made the same calculation, which is that their tight control over state governments will allow them to weather pushback from denying care to millions of people over the past decade and into the future. And while they receive scrutiny from local media, the national acquiescence to cruel policy as inevitable symptom of partisan politics indeed allows them to continue this path. Georgia’s failure should haunt it and lead to full expansion. More national coverage is needed to ensure that happens.
Voting Rights and Elections
Quietly, the fight to end the mass disenfranchisement of rehabilitated former felons has become one of the biggest ongoing civil rights campaigns in the country. There are battles over the issue being fought in at least four states right now, with much of the action taking place in litigation.
In Tennessee, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has moved to dismiss a lawsuit by the NAACP that demands the state create a uniform and accessible pathway for former felons to reclaim their right to vote. The organization was said to be close to reaching a settlement with the state this summer after more than two years of legal back and forth, only to see Skrmetti pull out of negotiations in July.
Tennessee currently has an opaque system that makes it almost impossible for the formerly incarcerated to regain the franchise. The NAACP argues that the process violates state law, which says rights should be restored after the completion of parole.
As the state and NAACP were on the cusp of hammering out a compromise, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case that called for a much higher barrier to restoration. Tennessee’s Coordinator of Elections used that ruling as an opportunity to raise the statewide threshold even higher than before.
The stakes here are enormous: There are over 470,000 rehabilitated citizens permanently banned from voting in Tennessee, including one in five Black residents of voting age. More broadly, nearly 10% of the state’s voting-age population is currently banned from voting.
In Minnesota, significant progress on this front has hit a strange bump in the road.
A rogue county judge has issued orders suspending the voting rights of at least six former felons, defying a new law signed by Gov. Tim Walz that restored the franchise to former felons who are no longer incarcerated. The law paved the way for 55,000 Minnesotans to register to vote over the summer, a major achievement that apparently rankled Mille Lacs County District Court Judge Matthew Quinn.
The suspensions were tacked on to probation orders, not so much as punishment for the defendants’ alleged crimes than to specifically violate the new law, which Quinn called “unconstitutional” based on his own novel legal theory.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who championed the restoration law, stepped in Friday to ask the state Court of Appeals to throw out two of the bans and stop Quinn from wreaking any more legal havoc.
“Judicial restraint and respect for the separation of powers are essential principles of our justice system. When either of those principles is violated, Minnesotans lose trust in the system — and Judge Quinn has violated both principles,” Ellison said in a statement. “I support a writ of prohibition as the best option for quickly keeping Judge Quinn from further violating our justice system and Minnesotans’ trust.”
The Court of Appeals is expected to make a ruling this week.
Arizona: No Labels, a right-wing dark money PAC posing as a nonpartisan political organization, has sued to stop Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes from spoiling their grift.
No Labels, once just an advocacy organization, established itself as a political party in several swing states earlier this year. In doing so, it earned a spot on the ballot in those states should it decide to run a limp corporate sycophant for president in 2024, a move that would very likely siphon votes from President Joe Biden and potentially sink his chances at re-election.
I produced this video on the whole scam in April:
Anyway, the organization is miffed at Fontes because he’s said that he is legally required to allow candidates from other parties to pursue No Labels’ ballot line for state and local elections. Pour one out for the billionaires feeling frustrated by an inconvenience in their plan to throw the next presidential election to Donald Trump
Ballot Initiatives
Washington: A hedge fund manager and Republican megadonor is pouring money into efforts to qualify a series of right-wing initiatives for the 2024 ballot.
The measures backed by Brian Heywood aren’t particularly ambiguous or creative, but they are pernicious. Mostly, they focus on repealing progressive laws that have been signed in recent years by Gov. Jay Inslee, including the establishment of a capital gains tax, a tax to fund long-term care, and the carbon pricing law.
All three start off rather unpopular with voters, according to a new poll commissioned by SEIU 775, which represents long-term care workers, and the environmental group Washington Conservation Action. That’s no surprise: Heywood sponsored 11 losers in 2022.
Still, he’s already put $5 million into the campaigns, which are also supported by the state Republican Party, and is likely to toss in more cash should they gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Michigan: The Ranked Choice revolution continues to slowly gain purchase across the country. Next month, voters in three Michigan cities — Kalamazoo, East Lansing, and Royal Oak — will decide on whether to adopt the system for local elections.
California: In something of a shocker, a new PAC funded by hotel owners is working to defeat a ballot initiative in Los Angeles that would require all hotels in the city to house homeless people next to paying guests. The city, of course, handsomely compensates hotels for housing the temporarily homeless, who are much more able to get back on their feet when living in decent, private conditions.
This is just a shoutout to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a man who has been the least welcomed guest at every party he’s ever attended.
The Astros were 0-4 in games that Cruz attended this post-season, and with a trip to the World Series on the line against the in-state rival Texas Rangers, the fan base didnt want to take any chances. They pleaded with the senator to take one for the team and stay far away from Minute Maid Park, just like he did when the power grid failed a few winters ago.
But Teddy Ballgame just couldn’t help himself, the hone team was powerless in the presence of a senator who just completed 100 episodes of a podcast he started to stan for the guy who called his wife ugly and implied his dad killed JFK, and the Astros got blown out 10-2, ending their season.
Bravo, Ted. Make sure to bring that energy to your next presidential campaign.
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