26 January 2019

Tomorrow’s Face the State will preview how cruel
the Montana Republicans’ rewrite of Medicaid will be

Mike Dennison’s guests on KXLH will be Rep. Ed Buttrey (R-Great Falls) and Rep. Mary Caffero (D-Helena). The program commences at the unprime (and unholy) hour of 0630 MST.

If Montana’s Republican legislators could get their way, there would be no expanded Medicaid in Montana. They don’t believe in it. But Montana’s hospitals need the funding, so Buttrey, et al, are grudgingly trying to provide it while making sure that as few as possible Montanans are covered, and that those who are covered are humiliated with mean-spirited and gratuitous conditions such as drug testing.

The GOP is in the driver’s seat because Initiative 185 was defeated last year, partly because of a heavily funded, vicious, campaign against it by the tobacco companies, but mostly because the initiative’s proponents ran a campaign so incompetent that by contrast Hillary Clinton’s campaign seemed professional and smart. The people who bungled the campaign got paid, some handsomely. The people who needed I-185 to prevail got screwed by the bunglers.

Although they will grouse and offer empty alternatives, Montana’s Democrats will agree to whatever gets shoved down their throats by the Republicans. Above all, Democrats believe in health care, which is good, and want people to have health insurance, which also is good, and therefore have developed an extraordinary capacity to rationalize that horrible legislation is better than nothing, and to wax so sanctimonious about it that the most pious bishop would cringe.

This state of affairs will continue until Montana’s Democrats learn how to win legislative majorities. They cannot advance progressive legislation by working with the so-called moderate Republicans. It’s time Democrats rid themselves of that delusion.