Good news (via Politico) for Pennsylvania:
Republican Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett is planning a Monday press conference to throw his support behind a version of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, industry and legislative sources tell POLITICO.
Corbett’s eyeing versions of expansion that rely on private-sector health plans rather than adding to the public Medicaid rolls, similar to approaches being considered in Iowa and Arkansas, according to the sources. The approach would bring in billions of Obamacare dollars marked for states that back expansion and use them to buy private insurance for the state’s poorest residents.
Medicaid expansion is a good thing for the working poor in Pennsylvania. The Oregon study strongly indicated that Medicaid significantly improves health and quality of life for its recipients. Pennsylvania is one of the last Obama voting states that had been holding out and it is a large hold-out.
The bad news on this probable announcment is that the expansion is being done in a cockamanie manner designed to prove that government can’t work. Simply expanding state Medicaid elibigibility rules would be faster and cheaper (as Medicaid pays a low reimbursement rate) than sending people to exchanges for products that have yet to be designed. Two steps forwards, one step back and then a piroutte towards social justice…..
Betty
He is a bastid- as my friend Charles would say. What were people thinking when they elected this piece of ****?
geg6
Fucking Corbett thinks this will somehow save his ass next year. I hate to break it to him, but this is the least of his problems.
Tommy
What is the phrase, there is Philly and Pittsburgh and Alabama inbetween?
HelloRochester
Cannot wait for Governor Schwartz. I thought Tom Ridge and Fast Eddie set the bar as low as governors could go (I fucking hate Ed Rendell because he never saw a problem that he thought couldn’t be solved with a casino).
Davis X. Machina
@Betty: ‘Fuck yeah. Screw Philly. Screw the nears!” is my guess.
RosiesDad
@Betty: I was thinking that I voted for the guy who lost.
Large swaths of PA are no different than Kentucky–low income, low information, very conservative because they are too dumb to know better.
The saving grace is that next November, we will throw this asshole out of office because he is pretty universally despised by this point.
Randy P
@Tommy: Yep. Or as we say in my corner of PA, “Pennsyltucky”.
Friggin Corbett. He’s also killing the state college system.
Figs
Is PPACA designed to give other holdout states the option to opt into the Medicaid expansion at any time, should citizens demand it or a more friendly set of legislators get elected?
Belafon
Maybe people like DougJ will remember to go to the polls next time, no matter how sure they think the outcome is.
MomSense
Aren’t there some states who have Medicaid programs with different levels? I think in Maine that at a certain income level, MaineCare (our name for Medicaid) recipients pay co-pays and such.
BTW, our Governor is refusing Medicaid Expansion and our legislature missed overriding his veto by just a few votes. The hospital association supports expansion and even the Maine Heritage Policy Center (Heritage Foundation) has said it will bring a lot of money into the state.
We also have a situation where the Governor and the Republican legislature deregulated the insurance industry in 2010 and as soon as we lost protections and the rates on the individual market went skyhigh, they of course blamed ObamaCare.
boatboy_srq
@Betty: He’s Levdaroum DeBastid.
When they campaign on government being the problem nobody should expect that they’d do anything but muck it up.
Tommy
@Randy P: I live in downstate IL. The only liberal county. North, south, east, west all not so liberal. Heck where I live the Democrats would be called a Republican in more liberal areas.
fka AWS
I think this is the wrong take. It’s designed to funnel money into the insurance companies who wouldn’t have gotten those funds if it had been a straight medicaid expansion.
Follow the money. Always.
Tommy
@boatboy_srq: My brother’s wife is a “birther.” Rand Paul gal. Guess what she does for a living, she works for the Federal government. I note this a little, not trying to start a fight, but she …..
Mike E
@Tommy: Cheesesteak, Pierogi, and Pickyernose in between. PA rednecks are the scariest, and I’ve been living in the South for 25 years!
raven
@Tommy: Champaign?
Richard Mayhew
@fka AWS: Pennsylvania is a Medicaid managed care state already — the insurance companies are the middle man between state/federal money, providers and people who actually need services.
Going the Arkansas route basically means less pricing pressure on providers, not on insurers.
mk3872
@Tommy: That’s a common Tweetie Bird Chris Matthews saying. Please don’t repeat it, it’s pathetically over-simplistic. BTW, 90% of PA’s population live in Philly or P’Burgh combined. Who cares about the few thousand gun nuts in Hazelton?
mk3872
I blame Obama
RSR
Right in line with the education
reformprivatization movement.There’s nothing the government can do that can’t be a source of cash flow for, as Atrios calls them, skimmers.
geg6
@Randy P:
Yup. Clarion and Edinboro have already announced huge cuts to programs and faculty. And they weren’t even crazy spendthrift institutions like CalU. CalU is in such huge financial trouble that I’ll be surprised if it even exists within the next decade. They spent like drunken sailors on stupid shit like luxury dorms and a massive convocation center and now they’ll end up like Clarion and Edinboro, cutting programs and faculty. But they’ll have beautiful facilities even if they no longer have the ability to educate! And that’s the legacy of Tom Corbett…ruining the educational infrastructure in a state that used to be one of the best in higher education. And don’t even get me started on what he’s doing to K-12.
Tommy
@mk3872:Get you. Areas are complex.
RSR
@HelloRochester: I’m waiting for some meaningful details on her education positions. Back in 2000 she was all ‘reformy’ but I haven’t heard anything lately.
geg6
@fka AWS:
Especially when it comes to Tom Corbett. Take a look at the fracking industry in this state. You want to know how he got elected? That’s it, in a nutshell.
Mike E
@mk3872: PA pop = 12.76M. If you count the exurbs, the bookends are about 65% of the total.
btw well over 1 million hunters are out on Opening Day.
geg6
@mk3872:
This. When Allentown is your third largest city, you really only have two cities.
And by the way, if Allyson Schwartz doesn’t win the primary (which I hope she does!), I’m perfectly willing to vote for the mayor of Allentown. He seems like a good guy, too.
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: Maybe you should ask your brother when his wife is going to get a job.
Ash Can
@Mike E:
Don’t be too quick to lump all hunters into either the “gun nut” or “redneck” categories, if this is in fact what you’re doing. There are plenty of erudite city folk and conscientious conservationist types among the hunting population.
Mike E
@Ash Can: No shit.
/raven
magurakurin
@mk3872:
but you’re probably dead right about the over-simplistic part
schrodinger's cat
Well what do you expect we are living in the second gilded age after all.
MrSnrub
@Betty: I didn’t vote for him, but during the election I had no idea he would be an extreme nutjob. I naively thought he’d be somewhat moderate.
Boy was I wrong.
Botsplainer
@Mike E:
On Opening Day, only a fool will go out on a woodland hike here in Kentucky or Southern Indiana. Those idiots will shoot at anything that moves.
Mike E
@MrSnrub: The same is being said here in NC about McCrory. Buyers remorse is a bitch.
geg6
@Mike E:
I can’t tell you how many of my co-workers, teachers at the local high schools and colleagues at other higher ed institutions voted for fucking Corbett. I would take great pleasure in how he’s now screwing them over if it wasn’t for the innocent students who are stuck in the middle.
Phil Perspective
@RosiesDad: Don’t forget that Onorato was a crappy candidate. His only campaign commercials consisted of saying that he’ll clean up Harrisburg if elected. Cleaning up corruption is good but isn’t that the job of the AG? Basically, he was another wishy-washy Democrat who wouldn’t stand behind any particular positions. How are people supposed to get excited by that kind of candidate?
Phil Perspective
@RosiesDad:
Large swaths of PA are no different than Kentucky–low income, low information, very conservative because they are too dumb to know better.
Too dumb to know better or is it because the only thing radio stations pump in is Rusty Limpballs and Sean Insanity?
Ash Can
@Mike E: Hence my qualifier. I couldn’t tell from your very sparse wording how you meant that.
Frankensteinbeck
@RosiesDad:
Your description of Kentucky is incorrect. I have two decades of experience with Kentucky, including adolescence. They’re not conservative because they’re ignorant – although Celestia knows, they are ignorant. They’re conservative because the culture steeps in hate and selfishness, an active desire to name anyone the Other so they can be abused.
On the ignorant front, I had coworkers (long ago) who argued about which country the Grand Canyon was in. The argument stopped when a more worldly Coworker chided them for believing in the Grand Canyon, which was made up for an episode of the Brady Bunch. This was accepted.
Randy P
@geg6: Amusing (in a bitter way) how many Pennsylvanians use “fucking” as Corbett’s first name.
Bobby Thomson
@Phil Perspective:
This. Fucker was pro-coat hanger before he got the nomination and was given to Liebermanesque running against the party. Plus he just sucked as a campaigner. All One Term Tom had to do in a Republican year was lie low and pretend to be a reformer.
RosiesDad
@Phil Perspective:
Yes, Onorato was a shitty candidate and when he was elected governor, we didn’t yet know Corbett’s role in keeping Jerry Sandusky under lid from his AG days.
@Phil Perspective:
Don’t you have to be too dumb to know better to invest that heavily in what Limpballs and Insanity have to say?
My wife grew up in the Harrisburg area and my father in law and brother in law–whom I really love dearly–are just that incredibly conservative. Physiologically incapable of pulling the lever for a non-Republican. My nephews, OTOH, are as lib as lib could be and they pull up chairs when their dad and I debate political points. It’s all good natured enough and I remind my brother in law that even though I will never sway him, the fact that his boys are on my side is already a big win.
Bobby Thomson
@Frankensteinbeck:
I suddenly have a new take on birtherism.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Never lived in Kentucky (though the cousins I have there don’t frankly inspire much confidence), but I’d have to agree to this… because the Republicans I’ve met on East Coast college campuses, hardly the most “low income” or “low information” people, frankly fulfill all the stereotypes as easily as any mythical trailer park dweller in Appalachia. And yes, selfishness, hate and an active desire to screw others was pretty vital. Ignorance, yes, that too, but only in the sense of being willfully ignorant and determined not to learn anything that contradicted their precious worldview.
Tommy
@Chris: Spent some time around these folks. Saying they are stupid is the easy way out. My experience is they are in fact not stupid. They might not think what I think from a political-point-of-view, but that doesn’t make them stupid.
rdldot
@Tommy: Just curious, where are you?
Mnemosyne
@RosiesDad:
Not at all, because Limpballs and Insanity have a very clever way of presenting their stuff — they claim that what they’re telling you is the “real” “inside” story that the liberal media won’t tell you about, but you’re too smart to fall for what the liberal media tells you to think, aren’t you?
It’s basically a mild(ish) form of the conspiracy theory thinking that so many Americans find appealing: we’re telling you the truth that the authorities don’t want you to know about! And really smart people can fall for really stupid conspiracies and cons because they automatically assume that they’re too smart to fall for them.