So far, the Legislature loves more Medicaid. Senator Wayne Steinhauer’s (R-9/Wall Lake) Senate Bill 102, the Medicaid expansion lockbox for American Rescue Plan incentive dollars, passed the Senate today 21–14. Determined to maintain a holding action against Obamacare were 14 Republicans: Bolin, Cammack, Castleberry, Crabtree, Greenfield, Frye-Mueller, Novstrup, Schoenbeck, Schoenfish, Stalzer, Sutton, Symens, Wiik, and Zikmund. That’s two more Senators than would be necessary to uphold a veto, if SB 102 makes it to the Governor’s desk and if our Governor decides she needs to veto anything that smells like Obamacare to keep her endorsement from the guy who muffed his chance to repeal Obamacare.
Steinhauer’s actual Medicaid expander, Senate Bill 186, is still waiting for Senate Health and Human Services to work up the courage to admit they’ve been wrong to block Medicaid expansion for a decade. But the full Senate has acted swiftly to expand Medicaid for dentists, optometrists, and chiropractors. This afternoon, every Senator except for Jim Bolin voted for House Bill 1103, which will expand socialized health care by increasing Medicaid reimbursements for tooth, eye, and joint care.
The Senate didn’t wreak any amendments on HB 1103, so this small expansion of Medicaid heads to the Governor’s desk as the first test of her resolve to resist any expansion of Medicaid. Will Noem take an absolute line and deem that spending more Medicaid money on certain subsets of health care providers opens the floodgates to spending more Medicaid money on poor people? Or will she try to thread the needle, signing this increase in socialized medicine payments for her donors in the world of chiropracty, then saying fair reimubrsements for hard-working chiropractors are fine, but more socialized medicine for lazy poor people is just too much.
She lost on her trans-potty bill, today.
Prolly in a real bad mood for the rest of the week.
290 chiropractors in South Dakota agree: groping is legal!
I answered a robo call survey about Medicaid expansion tonight. I hung up half way through.
The questions were all kind of like this: Would you support Medicaid expansion if you knew more lazy, worthless people than ever before would be getting free health care? After about six questions, all variations of my paraphrase, I hung up. Craziest survey I have ever done.
Howdy doodie, Ms. Caroline. That’s like a typical libbie survey but flipped to the Phil Jensen scale. You should have rigged the answers by just toying with them, the way grudznick does. I bet that is one of the notorious SteineySurveys.
full disclosure: grudznick wants the lazy slackards to get back to work instead of freeloading. So. I wish you had stuck on the call.
Caroline: interesting! Did you get to the disclosure? Did they say who they were or who paid them? Was it a robot or a live caller?
First suspect is Kristi Noem, looking for grounds on which she can veto Medicaid expansion. Second suspect is Americans for Prosperity.
grudz, when’s the last time you worked?
Cory, it was a robot. I did not wait for the end. Now I wish that I would have. If it had been a real person I would have stopped them and asked questions. I almost always answer survey calls for entertainment. I always tell them I am Republican and then answer like a Democrat to mess with their results. Honestly, this was the craziest survey I have ever heard. Basically, all questions could be answered either “I am opposed to Medicaid expansion”, or, “I admit to being an idiot who wants to destroy the world”.