In some states, kids get free lunch and health care. In others, their schools get destroyed.
In some states, kids get free lunch and health care. In others, their schools get destroyed.
The two Americas continue to split further apart
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
We’ve got a lot to cover today, including a week’s worth of good news coming from all across the country. After that, we’ll look at this weekend’s biggest political news from a slightly different angle and explore its firm connections to the right-wing war on freedom.
Health and Freedom
The federal government will allow states to begin kicking millions of people off of Medicaid next month, an offer that some governors are going to seize with far more relish than others. In other states, leaders are finding innovative ways to expand access to the government-run health care program, both to keep some of the most vulnerable populations enrolled and to use this moment to put a stake in the ground for the future of free care.
In Oregon, children will be allowed to stay enrolled in Medicaid up until they’re six years old without their parents or guardians ever having to renew their coverage with the state.
Kids still on Medicaid at six will be allowed to stay on their plan for another two years, even if their families at some point earn above the income limit. Oregon will likely soon be followed by Washington, which has already applied for federal approval, and New Mexico, which is in the public comment phase of the process. California will extend continuous care to kids up to age five, starting in 2025.
The continuous enrollment policy has kept millions of people on Medicaid since the start of the pandemic, swelling the enrollment to 90 million. Low-income families, especially those dealing with life upheavals and frequent moves, often do not stay current on all their paperwork, which frequently leads to discontinued coverage. It’s especially critical for young children, who require more regular doctors appointments and obviously rely on others to maintain their health coverage.
(I also am terrible at paperwork and hitting deadlines.)
In New Mexico, the legislature is looking to expand Medicaid in a much bigger way.
On Friday, the New Mexico state Senate gave its stamp of approval to a bill called Medicaid Forward, which is pitched as the first step toward a state public option.
The bill, which now just needs Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s signature, asks several state agencies to investigate the potential impacts of making the low-income health insurance program available to all residents regardless of their yearly earnings. It wouldn’t be free for everyone, but it’d likely be far more affordable than most private plans.
The old joke is that if you want to kill an idea, get a commission to study it, but legislators don’t seem to be intent on shunting the prospect off into the bureaucratic hinterlands. Given the very deep poverty and uninsured rates in New Mexico, this seems like it’s got a good chance of happening in some form.
The Ohio Ballot Board on Monday voted to permit pro-choice advocates to start gathering the signatures necessary to place an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution on the November ballot.
To get the amendment on the ballot, activists must obtain 413,446 valid signatures from at least 44 counties by July 5th. The proposed amendment would ask voters to affirm that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care and abortion.”
Abortion rights in Ohio are in limbo at the moment. Gov. Mike DeWine signed a trigger law in 2019 that would abortion after six weeks upon the fall of Roe v Wade, but it’s been put on pause during a long legal challenge. This amendment would overrule that or any other reproductive rights law statute in the state, preventing the legislature from banning abortion before fetal viability, which is around week 23 or 24 of pregnancy.
Because most Democratic voters in Ohio are concentrated into several larger counties, the 44 county requirement could potentially prove something of an obstacle for advocates of the amendment. At the same time, an October poll found that 60% of Ohioans said they’d support an abortion rights amendment, again showing that the issue for voters is not strictly a partisan one.
Still, activists clearly recognize the challenge they face, because they’ve already hired Mission Control Inc., the firm that ran point on defeating anti-abortion initiatives in Kansas and Kentucky. They will have their work cut out from them, as the anti-choice PACs have already dropped $5 million on TV and digital ads meant to fear-monger about the amendment by playing the tired “parental rights” and transphobic cards.
In Colorado, legislators advanced a bill on Wednesday that would require most insurance plans to cover medication abortions, contraception, vasectomies and STD treatment at no cost to the policyholder.
It would also expand the sorts of medical providers that can provide contraception without to minors without obtaining parental consent and prevent insurance companies from forcing HIV patients to go through cheaper and less effective treatments before paying for doctor-recommended care.
Colorado law requires mandates on insurance plans to go through a cost review, and interestingly, requiring coverage for reproductive care would actually bring down the average premium.
"Fewer unintended pregnancies will reduce medical costs that would otherwise result from pre/post-natal care, deliveries, and potential pregnancy complications. Reduced medical costs result in lower out-of-pocket costs for the member and lower costs to the carrier, which could be passed on to the members by way of lower premiums," the review said.
It’s logical! Put that one in your back pocket when somebody is arguing about the cost of government health care.
Government Works
As we keep stressing, it’s critical for the future of democracy that governments actually prove that they can make tangible positive impact on people’s lives. Here’s where that’s happening.
In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz on Friday a bill that guarantees free meals to all public school students.
One in six children in Minnesota is food insecure, and while 275,000 children already receive free breakfast and lunch, nearly 20% of children in the state are eligible for free or reduced price meals but don’t receive the benefit.
Up until Friday, the law required parents to apply for the meals every school year, and as noted above, parents in low-income families are more likely to be have a harder time keeping up with the paperwork.
The law goes into effect Monday, which is pretty rare for a benefit, and will cost the state just $200 million a year, a steal considering how much it will likely improve academic achievement and the health of young people. A handful of Republicans even crossed party lines to vote for the bill, while stingier members made clowns of themselves on the floor of the state Senate.
In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer included universal school meals in the budget that she sent to the legislature last month. Given full Democratic control of the state government, and the party’s willingness to take bold legislative action right off the bat, it’s likely that some version of the $160 million program will become law this year.
In Illinois, based billionaire Gov. JB Pritzker last week signed a bill that requires businesses to give employees paid time off, no sick note required.
Starting on Jan. 1st, Illinois residents will be guaranteed up to 40 hours of paid time off, no questions asked. They’ll accrue one hour for every 40 hours worked — essentially, one hour accrued per week, or a full day off earned roughly every two months.
It’ll take 90 days for workers to be able to access the benefit, though employers are welcomed and encouraged to offer more time off and make it accessible earlier on.
Seasonal and temporary school workers are exempt from the guarantee, which to me is an unnecessary and unfair clause. If you work somewhere for four months, there’s no reason why you should not accrue at least two days off. On a more positive note, this law has far fewer exemptions than Maine and Nevada, as it applies to businesses of all sizes.
And here in New York, the legislature sent Gov. Hochul a budget with what should be significant increases to the minimum wage.
In her State of the State address, Hochul called on lawmakers to index the minimum wage to inflation, so that it’d increase with the cost of living every year. The legislature also wants to index the wage to inflation, but only after providing more substantial and defined annual raises over the next three years.
The state Senate’s proposal does not specify how much each of the three raises would be worth, but I’m told that they will begin their negotiations by trying to achieve the proposal laid out in a proposal by state Sen. Jessica Ramos earlier this year.
As luck would have it, I produced a video on that proposal just a few months ago:
Hochul is no real fan of the idea, but there will likely be bigger battles during the all-important budget negotiation process. There’s no question that the wage will be increased in New York, and it’s exceedingly likely that there will be some version of the graduated raise before it’s indexed to inflation; the only uncertainly right now is just how high it’ll rise before it starts fluctuating year to year.
Donald Trump announced yesterday that he’s likely to be placed under arrest by the District Attorney of Manhattan this coming Tuesday, scrambling the news cycle and forcing reporters to spend their weekend trying to assess the source and merit of his prediction.
It is a reflection on just how warped our reality has become that I would 100% believe that Trump made the whole thing up just to goose fundraising, revel in round-the-clock cable news coverage, and cause pain for other Republicans. That’s probably giving him too much credit, as he’s not all that adept at long-term planning, but either way, it’s been nice to see certain Republican leaders that had tried to distance themselves from Trump now have to reverse course and publicly come to his defense.
To be honest, I expected very little to come of this case, given that DA Alvin Bragg has thus far shown the same enthusiasm for doing his job as Merrick Garland, and I would guess that most Americans were unaware that Trump was still under investigation for hush money paid to Stormy Daniels in 2016. Now that Trump has thrust the case back into the spotlight, the stakes have been raised more than most people realize.
I’m not nervous about a giant MAGA mob overrunning Manhattan at Trump’s behest, even if the weenie Nazis of the NY Young Republican Club want to cause some trouble downtown. My real concern is that the DA’s office offers up some weak, toothless charge or decides to not to recommend any at all, because it would send a message with far broader ramifications than whether Trump himself will stand trial.
Bragg passing on prosecuting Trump in any real way would make it twice in two weeks that famously arrogant and widely loathed billionaires have avoided consequences for brazen wrongdoing. Silicon Valley Bank had long been aware of its problems with balances, yet gave its executives fat bonuses anyway before Peter Thiel triggered an unnecessary run by depositors.
Instead of allowing the bank’s executives to twist in the wind and forcing their biggest venture capitalist clients to take a haircut loss after wasting far more of other people’s money, they all got a bailout. And should Trump not even need to make bail, it will yet again reinforce the notion that there are never any consequences for the rich and powerful, whether they’re in government or just taking the government’s money as corporate subsidies.
Continuously failing to punish the obviously corrupt fosters a sense of cynicism and ultimately disinterest and distrust of democracy. If working class and young voters stop caring, it will doom any chance of climbing out of the dismal era in which we now find ourselves. It’d also act as proof for certain jaded voters that the elites get preferential treatment, which would perversely benefit the GOP.
The Republican War on Freedom, as I’ve called it since early last year, has become more aggressive and nasty since the year began. Governors like Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott have been blatant in their disregard for the long-standing principles of local and democratic governance. That war will continue to get more brazen and nakedly bigoted so long as there is no concerted pushback and bad actors retain their sense of untouchability remains.
The past few weeks alone have been stunning. Last week, Greg Abbott decided to have a state agency seize control over Houston’s public schools, overriding the democratically elected Board of Governors under the thinnest of pretenses, a blatantly racist tactic meant to punish a community that largely consists of people of color and largely votes for Democrats.
In Arkansas, the state House just passed a bill that would create a uniform system for parental book challenges and criminalize any librarian that provided access to a book that a very unbiased panel decides contains “obscene” material.
Florida is about to enact universal school vouchers, a disastrous plan that will further rob public schools and funnel money to far-right private schools and white nationalist home-schoolers. At least DeSantis’s idiotic “Stop WOKE” is on pause at public colleges for the moment.
The two halves of this newsletter tonight could be about two entirely different nations, and sometimes it feels like we’re headed in that direction. Ongoing voter suppression and a Democratic disinterest in long-term investment in many states is leading to what seems like a permanent GOP majority in those places, and with it, the Supreme Court. Showing that government can significantly help working people, in ways that are obvious and undeniable, is one of the only ways to combat that slide.
Wait, Before You Leave!
Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, delivers incisive analysis, and continues to grow its paid reporting team. Yes, we pay everyone.
None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So to make this sustainable, hire new writers, and expand, I need your help.
For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:
Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting
Exclusive access to weekly member chats
Financing new projects and paying new reporters
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in an upcoming edition of the big newsletter!
“Instead of allowing the bank’s executives to twist in the wind and forcing their biggest venture capitalist clients to take a haircut loss after wasting far more of other people’s money, they all got a bailout.” Are you sure?
I was under the impression from the administration’s phrasing and the analyst reactions that only depositors / account holders were being fully refunded, and that the government was basically ensuring those who held money there got everything back AT THE EXPENSE of shareholders and executives-- or at least that was what Janet Yellen said would happen. (Though that may not count the bonuses executives paid themselves just before the crash, no clue if anything will be done about that.) There could be a shortfall covered by that federal bank collapse fund, but my understanding was that INVESTORS (and executives) were being forced to take the haircut in deposit-holders’ place.
Am I wrong about that? Because I might be -- I keep hearing mixed messages on the issue in the media, and that has me befuddled. Would appreciate if someone more knowledgeable could verify or correct me?