[quote=svelte][quote=utcsox]
It might not work the way Republican party elites will like it to work, I will like to remind you since Obummer took office, Republican have won 14 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 12 governorships, and 910 state legislature seats. If this is a failed strategy for a political party, show me a successful strategy.[/quote]
Not unusual that the party that loses the Presidential election picks up seats in the next cycles – it has worked that way often.
But they are doing mind-numbingly dumb things.
Let’s look at Oklahoma. Republican governor, Senate and House. Running a $1.3B deficit for the next fiscal year. That’s $420 for each man, woman and child in the state.
The starting pay for teachers is $31,600 in Oklahoma and they have a shortage that caused 850 classrooms to go unstaffed due to teacher shortage (I wonder why?). What is the Republican’s answer to all of this? SB1187 which eliminates the requirement for teachers to be certified and for districts to participate in the teacher retirement construct or do background checks on teachers. This bill will likely pass the Republican house and be signed by the Republican governor. Yessirree Bob, they have a crack leadership team in OK![/quote]svelte, I know a little bit about OK and can competently surmise where their general fund has gone over the past ~20 years. After the passage of the ACA, OK’s legislature did not agree to providing expanded Medicaid because they could not afford it and rightly so. OK already had/has a LARGE percentage of their population on Medicaid who not only have a very low income but are “asset-poor” enough to qualify for the program under the old (pre-ACA) guidelines.
In addition, OK has several hundred thousand residents eligible to enroll in Indian Health Services. The presence of Indian tribes in OK don’t cost the state anything but instead create new infrastructure (roads and water/sewer pipelines, etc) and thousands of living-wage jobs within the state.
Out of that nearly 4M residents, 819,194 OK residents (or nearly 21% of their population) was on Medicaid in May 2015 in the absence of expanded Medicaid:
…Medicaid is a program that is not solely funded at the federal level. States provide up to half of the funding for the Medicaid program. In some states, counties also contribute funds. Unlike the Medicare entitlement program, Medicaid is a means-tested, needs-based social welfare or social protection program rather than a social insurance program. Eligibility is determined largely by income. The main criterion for Medicaid eligibility is limited income and financial resources, a criterion which plays no role in determining Medicare coverage. Medicaid covers a wider range of health care services than Medicare. Some people are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare and are known as Medicare dual eligibles. In 2001, about 6.5 million Americans were enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. In 2013, approximately 9 million people qualified for Medicare and Medicaid…
Of course, since the inception of the ACA, many more millions of US residents are now on Medicaid due to Medicaid expansion in 30 states, as of 1/1/16.
IMO, the high rate of poverty is OK is due to the dearth of jobs in all but its two most populous cities, OKC and Tulsa. Another (expensive) public health issue it has is entirely due to SoCal ridding itself of their crystal meth scourge (primarily inland empire and East SD County) in the years before 2000 utilizing specialized teams comprised of multiple law enforcement agencies (city, county and Federal) working together. When these clean sweeps were made, these dozens of small-time mfrs were convicted and did their time in CA prisons. Upon release, nearly ALL fled to OK, AR and MO (heavily wooded in parts and much further from the int’l border and heavy police presence) to continue to ply their trade where they left off in SoCal back in ’97/98 :=0
OK did not and does not have enough available law enforcement ranks to deal with this problem effectively. The meth scourge has caused untold physical and mental damage to its (mostly rural) population as well as polluted several of its many beautiful lakes, rivers and streams. There are not enough water compliance people or even Nat’l park people employed there to keep up with the daily water quality in its recreational areas with vast lakes. At least a half-dozen (out of 38) of OK’s most prosperous Indian tribes have been stepping in to fund treatment for meth addiction in recent years, even extending services to non-tribal members (in addition to offering treatment for gambling addiction to OK residents). And of course, they’ve also been trying mightily to heavily educate their members on diabetes prevention and mgmt and enroll them in (paid for) smoking cessation programs.
Without the presence of OK’s tribes operating their own clinics and hospitals, I believe that at least 40% of its residents would qualify for Medicaid today under the old (pre-ACA) rules. I don’t blame OK’s governor OR its legislature for not expanding Medicaid. As we all now know, “Expanded Medi-Cal,” the poster child of the nation for unmitigated idiocy, has turned into very expensive “experiment” with a dearth of providers to serve what is now over 12M CA residents on the program, most of whom don’t want to be there and don’t know what they’re doing there. It’s truly a disaster for CA and should be scrapped, pronto.
I actually checked into this myself and found that there are actually very few “obamacare” providers in OK (especially primary care providers), relative to the 145,329 OK residents who signed up for it and are paying premiums. That’s only 3.7% of its population but many OK providers apparently don’t want to participate in it, undoubtedly causing a lot of OK residents to just forgo insurance and pay the penalty on their low incomes (if they aren’t eligible to access Indian Health).
In addition, the OK state treasurer likely did not collect as much tax as it usually does from Big Oil in the past year due to production being down.
IN short, OK has its hands full with a large portion of its uninsured and underinsured in poor health and many needing (or about to need) long-term care. Thank G@d for its many tribes and charitable organizations picking up the slack. It’s as is should be. OK and AR had/have some very peaceful, bucolic areas to camp, boat, fish and ski in and it has been heartbreaking to me to see the after-effects of the “meth scourge” in this region.
