The poll, conducted by Virginia-based political and public affairs research firm Public Opinion Strategies, asked 400 South Dakota residents a series of questions related to the state’s Medicaid program and found 63 percent of them favored the expansion.
The poll was good news to supporters of Medicaid expansion. Megan Myers, the Cancer Action Network’s grassroots manager, said expanding Medicaid would help some of the 48,000 South Dakotans who don’t have health insurance receive preventive care.
And what is our governor’s response on his resistance;
Gov. Dennis Daugaard has been unwilling to expand Medicaid since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision in the Affordable Care Act that would have forced states to expand their programs, and despite the federal government’s promise to cover the vast majority of the costs, especially in the initial years.
Daugaard’s office declined to comment on the poll.
Denny has said in the past the able-bodied working folk should be able to afford their own healthcare. What Denny fails to tell us is that many ‘working folk’ in our state can’t afford food let alone healthcare, and the Republican lawmakers in DC are not helping matters by blocking single-payer initially in the ACA and recently cutting SNAP programs.
So what is Denny telling the working poor that can’t afford private insurance or even to feed their families? WORK HARDER or I’ll be forced again to blow a cool million at one staffing agency to recruit a handful of welders for a single trailer building company in Mitchell.
“Denny has said in the past the able-bodied working folk should be able to afford their own healthcare.”
This has become a pretty standard Republican policy strategy lately – wishing that an outcome is true (hard work = living wage), then stating that it is already true.
So, you don’t want the state to know when you buy sneeze aid but you want single payer.
You’ve got some twisted logic.
Just as long as the goverment buys you shit, your OK with it.
Oh Tom,
Our goverment has only gotten bigger and given more handouts, is there less poor now?
The dems were all about reform of the sytem in the wake of the banking bubble. Has the stock market been kept in check?
The dems were all for making more jobs. New stats show true unemployent hovering at 12%
I’m sure you’ll site republican obsctuction voting as the golden excuse, but how did you get Obamcare through?
How is party politics working out for us?
@LJL,
“My” party (as you imply; I’m actually not a Democrat) is the least insane major political party around today, although that’s not really much to hang your hat on. I agree with you that the political system is this country is broken – probably to the point where revolution, political or otherwise, is likely to be the only long-term remedy available.
Each of the points you make has merit:
(1) a large government is not necessarily a more effective or efficient one;
(2) banking and financial reform is a joke, as is the illusion of rule-of-law in those sectors;
(3) the endless economic malaise shows no signs of stopping, and may actually indicate not a struggling economy, but an obsolete one.
I can’t agree with your implication that Republican obstructionism is just some fantasy invented by the left – it’s real, it’s powerful, and it’s harmful – but in the long run it may actually accelerate the dismantling of the political duopoly that’s going to be necessary for the American Experiment to continue to exist, politically, for any significant length of time into the future.
In short, I think that local control – on the State and municipal level – is only going to become more important in the future. Cities (Sioux Falls especially) are going to need to prioritize and plan for a future where “free” Federal and State money will not always be there to bridge the gaps. For me, it all starts and ends with building financially productive, economically resilient neighborhoods. As far as I can tell, neither party has claimed that territory for its own.
So yeah – party politics sucks.
Local control with our current city government? Now that scares the sh** out of me.
Touché.
LJL: “The dems were all for making more jobs. New stats show true unemployent hovering at 12%”
Oh I get it… so when unemployment drops to 6.7% from the 10% we were experiencing in November 2009 we now have to reinvent how we calculate it to reflect a more ‘true’ figure of 12%?
Yea that makes sense. I suppose when it drops to under 6% (something we are on track to experience before the end of 2014), I suppose then we will need to develop an entirely new metric to ensure certain websites, blogs, pundits, and political hacks and continue to proclaim that ‘true’ unemployment is still in the double-digits.
Intellectual honesty is so overrated anyway.
Our governor has his head stuck in the sand.
Craig
Nice try at cherry picking what you think are the facts from mutlipoint debate.
Too bad it didn’t work.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101326426
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2013/07/05/why-the-real-unemployment-rate-is-higher-than-you-think/
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2013/04/05/real-unemployment-rate/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-07/real-unemployment-rate-113
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/05/is-the-real-us-unemployment-rate-11-3-or-7-5-a-new-goldman-sachs-study-offers-an-answer/
Keep beleiving what the gov tells you Craig.
If you want insurance, drive an egg truck like dooguard did.
I agree Tom… Fixing these problems starts closer to home not in DC. WE need to stop pointing fingers and labeling. Lets point out all hypocrocy and corruption no matter the source.
Feeding the machine more money doesn’t work. Lets take a look at where the money truly needs to be spent.
Do you think Medicade should pay for visits to the ER for hangovers, gential warts, pink eye, diarehea hemriods and so on and so on.
Well it does. The ER can’t turn them away.
I’ve got several family and friends that see it everyday on their jobs in both hospitals. I’ve heard so many stories it makes you red with anger.
Why did my auto correct stop working. I condt sfpell shirit wihtout it.
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
If you do not have the money to feed yourself, how can you have the money for healthcare?
We need to ask ourselves if we are/want to be a civilized and progressive society or go back in time.
“Oh Tom, Our goverment has only gotten bigger and given more handouts, is there less poor now?”
Actually, yes. Because of the “handouts.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/?p=74662
But, I mean, data. Yuck. Who wants that shit when you can peddle empty rhetoric?
Actually, single-payer is not a ‘hand-out’ just like public education. You would still have to pay into your payroll taxes for your single-payer insurance.
Headline News reported that Emergency Rooms are declining. One thing not anticipated about Obamacare is everyone assumes all will have healthcare. If you can hardly afford food, you can’t afford health insurance. Yes, it’s mandatory but there’s still fallout. Looks like you’ll not only be unemployed, you’ll have to do time in jail to become a ward of the state so you can get health care. No doubt, Denny & Doorstop see healthcare as a new profit center. Like everything else, use the taxpayer to become a billionaire.
Stats from a repututable source.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/18/who-receives-benefits-from-the-federal-government-in-six-charts/
LJL you can try to continue to tell us that the definition of unemployed should change, but your own data shows the number you refer to is an entirely different metric (actually several different metrics).
You can spin it any way you want, but since we don’t shift the definition of a metric when it just so happens to benefit us, we have a standard unit of measurement – and therefore the actual percentage of unemployment is currently 6.7%.
If you want to complain about the underemployed rate coupled with the unemployed then that is fine… but you need to look at the trends there as well, and they are decreasing.
Since your original point seemed to be that there are no new jobs being created, you would also have to explain the month over month increase in jobs added. I’ll concede we aren’t adding nearly as many jobs as would be ideal, but the point is we are in fact adding jobs – we are no longer losing them.
So really… who is being dishonest here?
LJL: “Stats from a repututable source. ”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/18/who-receives-benefits-from-the-federal-government-in-six-charts/
Those are some interesting charts, and I don’t doubt their validity based upon the sources provided. What I do find interesting howveer is per Figure 1, it shows that 73% of entitlement benefit spending goes to the elderly or the disabled. Only 18% goes to working households.
So when people talk about how so many people are living off the government… is that really fair? Should we classify those on Social Security as living off the government when it reality they are merely withdrawing funds from the account they helped build? What about the disabled – should we look at them like leeches when they were paying into the system for so many yeasr before being in a position to receive some help?
Then the real magic happens in figure 3 when they examine tax expenditures (deductions and tax breaks). There we can clearly see such expenditures disporportionally impact the wealthy. The top 1% of taxpayers alone collect 24% of the benefit.
So who is really benefitting from the government? Seems if we want to talk about reducing spending, one place to start would be to slash some tax breaks rather than trying to slash Medicare or Social Security as some others have proposed.
I remain convinced that eliminating the mortgage interest deduction is probably the single most positive change we could make to the tax code.
I saw in the AL today, Denny changed his mind ‘a little’ on Medicaid. If you are the poorest of the poor then you deserve it, but if you are just run of the mill poor, you don’t. SD Republicans never cease to baffle me.
LJL – your response is a great exampl4e of EXACTLY what Tom was describing as the conservatives’ “wishful belief = reality” mindset.
You claim government has gotten bigger and bigger:
The FACT is that the number of government jobs TODAY is at the lowest it has been in 47 years.
http://economy.money.cnn.com/2013/10/22/government-jobs-at-lowest-in-47-years-or-4-years/
You claim there are more and more handouts:
The FACTS are: Federal spending on welfare payments is at the SAME level it was in 1975 (40 years ago in case your math disability is as consistent as your truthiness)
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_spending
You claim that poverty is as high as ever:
The FACTS are the US poverty rate is about HALF what it was before the “war on poverty” was started.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts/
Stop listening to Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity – they are LIARS!!!
In SD (family of three) if you make between $9,200 and $19,500/yr you can buy insurance for $400/mo for the parents. No tax credit. Obviously the child under 18 is cover by CHIP.
But if you make $20,000/yr, you can get the same insurance for $34/mo w/tax credit – $350 deductible – $700 max out of pocket – low copays and prescription.
If the same family makes $60,000/yr the same insurance is $400/mo with a tax credit.
This is totally screwed up. The poor person gap is as bad or worse than SD in at least 20 other states. In Alabama you have to make less than $178/mo to qualify for Medicaid!
The states that did not opt in all have a very low income threshold. States like MN that did opt in already let people with incomes of up to $39,000 qualify for Medicaid.
rufsx – the other facts on the WP link show that once all the low income programs were in place the poverty rate is essentially flat, BUT our spending on just low income programs has more than doubled as a % of real GDP.
One would expect a rapid decline once the feds started handing out money in ’64. But the trend of spending increases as a % of real GDP is not a trend one would like to see.
Let me predict right now, if Denny is re-elected next fall he will rediscover Obamacare and he will then advocate expanding Medicaid for the 2016 State budget.
This is all about appeasing the “Tea Party” element of his Party. Once he gets around that, I believe he will finally come home to the benefits for the workers, the State, and for work force development, which the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid has to offer.
Tom H. #19. The only significant deduction left for the middle class is mortgage interest. We deserve one small tax break if business and billionaires get TIF’s. Mortgage interest has hovered around 4% and is hardly an issue. Without this break many can’t afford a home and the housing industry would suffer. If the government can’t provide healthcare, they can at least help us keep our homes. For most families, their only asset is equity in their house.
It’s a logical fallacy to assume that “people can’t afford a home” is equivalent to “housing would suffer”. The housing market is so heavily distorted (by many things, the mortgage interest deduction being one of the big ones) that it’s hard to really predict what a free housing market would really dictate. Certainly not the McMansions that dot the landscape on the edge of town.
Basically, I see the home mortgage interest deduction doing two things: (1) artificially pushing people who are more suited to renting into home-ownership (even though their fundamental economics don’t support it); and (2) pushing people who could afford modest houses into purchasing ones that are too large (again, based on their own fundamental ecnomics). If those two things aren’t basically the definition of a housing bubble, I don’t know what is.
tl;dr – Somehow we got in our minds that everybody deserves to own a home, so the government should massively subsidize such endeavors. I disagree.
I tend to agree with you Tom, but we have this whole concept of the “American Dream” ™ concept which has convinced the consumer that in order to be successful they must be a homeowner. It is unfortunate.
The other aspect of the mortgage interest deduction that people fail to acknowledge is that it really isn’t helping the lower or middle classes as much as we might like to think, because people in those sectors often take the standard deduction rather than being able to itemize.
Those in the upper income brackets do tend to itemize, and therefore they benefit most from the mortgage interest deduction.
For example, per the Tax Policy Center (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/uploadedpdf/412099-mortgage-deduction-reform.pdf), 4 of out 5 taxpayers in the 40th to 60th income percentile wouldn’t pay any higher taxes. The 1 out of 5 that would pay higher taxes would be an average of $215 a year.
On the flip side, 3 out of 4 people in the 90th to 95th income percentiles benefit from the deduction, and they would end up paying around $2600 a year more in taxes if it was removed.
So the next time someone tells you the mortgage interest deduction is a handout to the middle class you’ll know they are lying. Realtors and builders don’t want to hear it because it may impact their incomes, but in terms of tax expenditures this deduction should be at the top of the list for elimination.
Slewfoot. How much in tax reductions have the “job creators” received since 1964?? And yet – if we are to believe you, we’re spending more and more and more on anti-poverty programs. And since it’s not the wealthy that are paying more –
WHO IS IT that is paying more?
Where’s the trickle down?
Looks like bleeding both ways from the middle to me – at best.
Except, the amount squirting up is sufficient to make it that what appears to be the amount dripping down is just that – a little splash that happened just because the big cup at the top got filled too fast. They are always looking for a bigger cup. How many BILLIONS did just Goldman Sachs get “bailed out” with again??? Corporate welfare is MUCH bigger drain on the economy to any few poor people.
UH OH…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/15/kimmel-sums-up-obamacare_n_4602788.html
I don’t care who you are…. that is funny.