First Steps/Medicaid Cuts

This yesterday from MissouriNet:

Delivery of mental health care in Missouri is changing, thanks in large part to a $14 million dollar grant from the federal government....

...high on the agenda: integrating health care with mental health care and teaching people how to better diagnose and treat their own mental health problems.

Fantastic!­

Sounds a lot like Matt Blunt's plan for Medicaid, which was also about teaching people to diagnose and treat their own illness.

Shorter Hank Waters:

Missouri Democrats are disingenuous about wanting to restore coverage to those cut by Matt Blunt from Medicaid because the Republican-controlled legislature will never let them do it.

The Republican candidates for Governor haven't highlighted the issue of health care access because they don't care whether coverage expands or not.  They are fine with the health care access backsliding fostered by the Blunt administration and the current levels of uninsured Missourians.­

Somehow, the email correspondence that follows wound up in my inbox.  Original message is below the reply...

We learned last week that Jodi Stefanick --former legislator and architect of the 2005 Matt Blunt Medicaid cuts which led to the governor's still-wrecked popularity-- was abandoning ship and leaving the administration.  According to the Political Fix...

Stefanick plans to move to Boston to be closer to her family. The move has been planned since last summer, said Nanci Gonder, a spokeswoman for Gov. Matt Blunt.

It is probably no accident that Stefanick chose Massachusetts as her new home.  It was that state, after all, that passed a new law in 2006 that expanded health care coverage to an additional 300,000 residents.  Given that, Stefanick no doubt believes that the Bay State is a place where she can put her ample skill at cutting people off health insurance to productive use.

If undoing "a portion" of the GOP's disastrous 2005 Medicaid cuts is a good idea, as some House Republicans now seem to agree, wouldn't undoing all the cuts be even better?

Puzzling.  Anyway, congratulations to Republican legislators up for re-election this year who continue to hang like grim death onto the bulk of Blunt health care cuts.  They own 'em. 

The News-Leader provides some coverage of a new report from a national health care advocacy organization, and the news is terribly sad:

Nearly 10 working-age adults in Missouri die each week because they don't have health insurance, according to a new report by Families USA, a national organization for health care consumers. The report was released Wednesday....

The study showed 18,000 U.S. adults died in 2000 due to lack of health insurance, Pollack said. A subsequent study by the Urban Institute showed that 22,000 adults died in 2006 for lack of health insurance.

The report shares the fact that, "Between 2000 and 2006, an estimated 2,800 Missouri adults ages 25-64 died because they didn't have health insurance."  The full report is online here.

It is worth noting, of course, that the defining public policy choice of Matt Blunt's term as governor was the decision to cut more than 100,000 Missourians off from health insurance.  Similarly disturbing is that the man who hopes to succeed him, Kenny Hulshof, voted against legislation that would have provided coverage to 56,000 Missouri children via the S-CHIP program. 

An article in St. Louis Today had the following:

Via Combest, I see perpetual nut Ed Emery is on the loose again:

“I’ve talked to (state Rep.) Bryan Stevenson and others about trying to come up with some things we can do to make it difficult for that type of perverted business to sustain itself in Missouri,” he said.

Thank god someone is finally using his time in the legislature to protect us from the totally horrifying "perverted business." 

In other news, nearly 800,000 Missourians still lack health insurance.

As Kenny Hulshof begins his race for the GOP gubernatorial nod, his most pressing challenge (besides finding his way back to the state) will be convincing voters that he doesn't share the same fatal flaw as Matt Blunt on the issue of health care.  Unfortunately for him, Hulshof has built a record of abject failure on children's health care while in Congress.

A new report from Missouri Pro-Vote digs through Hulshof's record and finds that his recent voting history is chock full of votes against coverage for Missouri's kids.  From the report on the Hulshof health care horror show:
 Story Continued »

In what may be the least surprising coverage of the decision by Matt Blunt not to seek a second term, the KC Star's Steve Kraske has written a column that explains how Blunt's sudden departure from the race is actually really, really good for Republicans.  In Kraske's world, the news --whatever it is-- always accrues to the benefit of the Republican Party.

At first glance, the news is all bleak for Missouri Republicans in the wake of Gov. Matt Blunt’s dramatic announcement Tuesday that he will not seek re-election this year.

Or is it?

“Out of chaos you can often make some substantial gains,” said former state GOP Chairman Hillard Selck, who’s been watching Missouri politics for more than half a century.

In a piece of writing that approaches brilliant self-parody, the header for Kraske's column when it was posted to the Star's PrimeBuzz blog was "Kraske Analysis: This may be the best thing to have happened to Missouri Republicans."  Of course it is.  Every state political party wants to have its sitting governor drop out of his re-election race nine months out with no heir apparent, right?­

The State Treasurer follows conflict of interest rules governing a state program that lends money at below-market interest rates.  Those rules, as David Lieb points out today for the AP, prevent such loans from being given to certain elected officials or their families --leaving business venture Show Me Ethanol in a precarious position due to the identities of some of its investors:

That's because its investors include state Rep. John Quinn, R-Chillicothe; his wife, Mary; and Andy Blunt, the brother of Republican Gov. Matt Blunt. Also invested in the plant is Lesley Graves, the wife of U.S. Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo.

Fired Up Missouri has written at length about the blatant self-dealing represented by the Show Me Ethanol plan that underlies this story.  And that element remains unsettling.  But the responses included in today's story reveal a new layer of detachment and callousness on the part of powerful GOP figures. 

A new report from health care watchdog Families USA takes a look under the hood of Governor Blunt's Insure Injure Missouri health care "plan" and finds the scheme to be significantly lacking. 

The report, available here, illustrates with a fair amount of detail the reasons why Blunt's new health care plan comes nowhere close to undoing the horrific damage done by his cuts to Medicaid in 2005.  Below are some notable points about how Injure Missouri would affect...

Quote of the week comes from Matt Blunt in David Lieb's story about how Matt Blunt plans to spend like a drunken sailor in an election year:

“I’d like to see somebody try to argue that I’m not a fiscal conservative, that I’m not willing to do anything to balance the budget and protect taxpayers.  If there’s an Achilles heel out there, that’s not it.”

Anything including taking health care from more than 100,000 Missourians, he means.