Democrats vow to take the battle to the courts
By Eric Valentine
“When the Governor vetoed the Revenge on Voters Act last week, we were hopeful that he understood the importance of using his position to stop Idaho from being forced into embarrassing lawsuits. Clearly, we were wrong. We will waste millions of taxpayer dollars implementing barriers to Medicaid coverage and millions fighting those barriers in court. The Governor has made a decision that is both fiscally irresponsible and inhumane.”
That’s the collective comment the state’s Democratic leadership—specifically, the Idaho Joint Democratic Caucus—offered in response to Gov. Brad Little’s decision to sign restrictions on Medicaid expansion into law yesterday. Democrats said they will challenge Idaho Senate Bill 1204 in court where they believe the law will side with them.
At issue is how a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid coverage to significantly more Idahoans should be carried out. More than 61 percent of voters approved the initiative in the last November election. Now it’s time to fund it. And to do that, Republican leadership in the legislature has proposed a number of ways to quell their fiscal concerns.
Among those proposals: work requirements—to ensure that able-bodied Medicaid-eligible residents were holding down a job, or at least attempting to. Democrats, however, claim that enforcing those requirements would unfairly remove certain Idahoans from healthcare coverage and would end up costing the state more money than it would save.
“The mandatory work requirements added to the bill will cost at least $3 million to administer and won’t make much, if any, difference because Medicaid Expansion primarily benefits the working poor who have jobs but don’t make much in wages,” Sen. Grant Burgoyne (D-Boise) said.
Democrats claim as many as 12,000 Idahoans could now lose eligibility for expanded Medicaid healthcare coverage.
According to Close the Gap Idaho—a proponent of unfettered Medicaid expansion—a federal judge ruled Medicaid work reporting requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas unlawful because work-reporting requirements violate the central tenet of the Medicaid program and, therefore, coverage cannot be conditioned on work.