Weiland Offers Two Medicaid Expansion Initiatives; Ravnsborg Offers Benign Explanations

Wow—pretending to be Attorney General has made Jason Ravnsborg so tired that, presented with two potential ballot questions to expand Medicaid in South Dakota, he didn’t even bother to rig his statutorily required explanations with SDGOP propganda!

Ballot question promoter Rick Weiland of Sioux Falls has submitted two initiatives—one a law, one a constitutional amendment—to expand Medicaid. They aren’t long; each fits on a single page. Here’s the proposed initiated measure:

The initiated amendment, proposed to insulate Medicaid expansion from (Republican) Legislative sabotage or repeal, differs only in not citing specific federal law and not specifying the rule-making authority of the Department of Social Services.

Ravsnborg, who hates Medicaid expansion and everything else Obamacare, totally missed his opportunity to write anything bad about Weiland’s proposals on the ballot. Ravnsborg’s identical explanations are pretty straightforward and mostly restate Weiland’s legal text:

Medicaid is a program, funded by the State and the federal government, to provide medial coverage for low-income people who are in certain designated categories. This measure expands Medicaid eligibility in South Dakota. It requires the State to provide Medicaid benefits to any person over age 18 and under 65 whose income is at or below 133% of the federal poverty level and who meets other eligibility requirements in federal law. For people who qualify under this measure, the State may not impose burdens or restrictions that are greater than those imposed on any other group eligible for medical assistance.

The State must obtain federal approval of the medicaid expansion coverage set forth in this measure. Additionally, the South Dakota Department of Social Services must pass rules to implement this measure [Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg, explanation of initiated measure to expand Medicaid, filed 2020.07.17].

Maybe Ravnsborg, who may be running for reëlection on the same 2022 ballot as these initiatives (unless Shantel Krebs gets a law degree and stages another coup against a GOP nincompoop), realizes that Medicaid expansion is a slam dunk with voters (even conservative Oklahomans passed it last month). Maybe he realizes what John Tsitrian mentions, that Medicaid expansion is a nice way to bring some more federal dollars in to shore up the state budget:

My guess is that the strong Republican support Medicaid expansion has gotten, first from then-Gov. Mike Pence, when he put it into place in Indiana in 2014, and most recently in Oklahoma, where the dollars-and-cents aspects of the issue were overwhelmingly supportive of the idea, could put some pressure on Noem, particularly as the state – along with the rest of the country – is dealing with what will probably be one of the worst recessions in history.

Yes, South Dakota has to shell out some money to get this thing going, but Noem’s predecessor, Republican Dennis Daugaard favored expansion and came up with a fairly decent plan to keep it from biting into the state’s budget [John Tsitrian, “Medicaid Expansion Petitions Are About to Go Public in South Dakota. Oklahoma Just Said Yes. We Should Too,” South Dakota Standard, 2020.07.19].

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Weiland still has to get these measures on the 2022 ballot. He can’t start circulating petitions until this November 8; he will then have one full year to collect 16,961 signatures for the initiated measure and 33,921 signatures for the amendment. He has the next three months to buy his circulators masks, gloves, and 50,000 pens and figure out how to safely interact with tens of thousands of voters in ways that won’t spread coronavirus.