Job one for the plutocrats: destroy the medicaid expansion
by digby
You’ll recall in the recent government shutdown that the Koch brothers went out of their way to say they were not behind efforts to defund Obamacare. And they were right. They have a different strategy altogether: screwing the poor, first and foremost:
Here in Virginia’s capital, conservative activists are pursuing a hardball campaign as they chart an alternative path to undoing “Obamacare” — through the states.
One leading target is Emmett W. Hanger Jr., a Republican state senator from the deeply conservative Shenandoah Valley, who prides himself on “going against the grain.” As chairman of a commission weighing one of the thorniest issues in Virginia politics, whether to expand Medicaid under Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he is feeling heat from the Republican right.
His openness to expansion has aroused the ire of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Dressed in emerald green T-shirts bearing the slogan “Economic Freedom in Action!” its members are waging what the senator calls “an attempt to intimidate me” in Richmond and at home.
They have phoned his constituents, distributed leaflets and knocked on 2,000 doors in his rural district. When the Republican town committee met Monday night in Mr. Hanger’s home county, Augusta, Americans for Prosperity was there.
In Richmond on Tuesday, hundreds of volunteers in green shirts turned out for a commission hearing, bused in by the advocacy group’s field organizers, who provided Subway sandwiches for lunch.
“This has been one of those trench warfare kind of efforts for a year now, and I think it is one of those hidden stories of the whole fight against Obamacare,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “It’s not flashy; it’s just in a whole bunch of state capitals and in the districts of a whole lot of state legislators, but it’s such a crucial aspect of the overall long-term effort to roll back Obamacare.”
Isn’t that nice?
What they understand about Obamacare is that the only truly progressive piece of it is the Medicaid expansion. Total destruction of this part of it is job one, lest people get it in their heads that government programs for poor people are the American Way.
It’s amazing that billionaires worth more than most countries have absolutely no shame in denying the poorest Americans access to basic health care, but that’s how they roll.
If we had a functioning democracy, this would present a roadblock:
Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to be relevant to anything these horrible greedheads may successfully accomplish since our political system is drowning in their money. Still, it’s interesting.
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