26 March 2019 — 2111 mdt

The completely unnecessary sunset provision in the
2015 expanded Medicaid act led to Buttrey’s current evil

Heavily amended, but still mean-spirited, HB-658 was approved 11–8 today by the MT House’s human services committee. Making the bill less harsh will be exceedingly difficult, as Republicans, most of them philosophically opposed to We the People solutions to healthcare, control the legislature, and a veto of this abomination could lead to no expanded Medicaid because the current law sunsets when June ends.

That sunset provision had only one purpose: giving Buttrey more leverage in 2019. Not having a sunset in the original law would not have prevented any legislator from offering amendments to the law in subsequent legislative sessions. But the absence of a sunset would have empowered the governor to maintain the status quo — and protect the 96k+ recipients of expanded Medicaid — by vetoing bad amendments to the law.

The sunset awarded great political power to Buttrey and a small band of so-called “responsible Republicans.” Now they’re using it to convert a program to provide low income people with medical care to a hippie-punching program designed to reduce the number of people served by expanded Medicaid (see Catlett).

Democrats are partly to blame

Montana’s Democrats have become accustomed to being in the minority in the legislature. They’ve convinced themselves they can govern through a coalition with the “responsible Republicans.” That rationalization weakens their incentive to win majorities in both houses of the legislature, and disposes them to issue cloying paeans to bipartisanship instead of putting up a spirited fight.

Today’s debacles on expanded Medicaid — HB-425, which would have extended the current law, was mutilated with Frankenstein amendments before it was killed; and HB-658’s approval — ought to disabuse all Democrats in Montana of the fantasy that they can pass good legislation by lurching across the aisle to work with the GOP’s alleged moderates. I hope that’s the lesson Democrats learn from losing this lesson in class warfare — but I suspect many will conclude that they failed because their genuflections were not sufficiently self-abasing to propitiate concessions from “moderate” Republican legislators.