The political theater being staged on the backs of our state’s working poor has gone from tragi-comedy to farce.
The Network anticipated that Gov. Nikki Haley, like other governors who refused to expand Medicaid, would promote a plan to privatize the federal funding. That way she could claim victory over Obama and keep the federal government from getting between a quarter of a million poor South Carolinians and the doctor they don’t have. Gov. Haley could direct the billions of returning tax dollars to health care-related corporations that, according to FollowTheMoney.org, have contributed more than $1.6 million to her political campaigns.
When the privatization scheme was promoted in April by moderate state senators who claimed it was the only way to get the much-needed health care funding, Gov. Haley confounded political prognosticators by promising to veto privatization.
Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at MIT, noted that the holdout states are “willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people.” Gruber, a free-market economist who helped design the ACA, has called Haley’s position “awesome in its evilness” and “political malpractice.”
Network director Brett Bursey recently met with one of the Republican Senate sponsors of a privatization waiver. The senator acknowledged that while the US must ultimately move towards the type of universal health care found in all other industrialized democracies, the only politically practical step to get health care for poor South Carolininans was privatization. He noted that Haley’s pursuit of higher office, combined with 2016 legislative elections that will inhibit a veto-overide, means our state’s most vulnerable people will continue to suffer. And our tax dollars will go elsewhere until a new governor takes office.
The Network will continue to oppose privatization of Medicaid while we do the long, hard work of building a movement with the power to punish politicians who treat our citizens as pawns in their selfish game.