Charlotte Observer. February 26, 2022.
Editorial: This time it’s time for North Carolina to expand Medicaid
North Carolina is seeing a dramatic example of political climate change: Its long frozen opposition to Medicaid expansion is beginning to thaw.
But unlike polar ice sheets ominously sliding into the sea, it’s a good thing that Republican lawmakers are warming to this life-saving opportunity. It’s also a chance to stop passing up federal money. By failing to expand Medicaid from 2013 to 2022 North Carolina has forgone about $40 billion in federal Medicaid funding, according to the Urban Institute.
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State Senate leader Phil Berger, long an opponent of expansion, now says he will consider it. A joint House and Senate committee is assessing a potential expansion’s costs and benefits. A bill setting the terms for making more than half a million North Carolinians eligible for the state and federal health insurance program is expected to get a vote before the November election.
In North Carolina, most adults without minor children or who are not disabled are not eligible for Medicaid no matter how low their income. Expansion would allow the enrollment of all adults earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line – $17,774 a year. That would provide health insurance for many of the state’s working poor.
The prospect of expanding Medicaid has come up before only to fade in the face of opposition in the Republican-controlled General Assembly. But it would be politically dangerous to reject it now. Polls show strong support for expansion in North Carolina and holdout states are increasingly isolated. Thirty eight states have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. South Dakota voters will decide in November whether their state should become the 39th.
Medicaid expansion has long been a deal too good to refuse, but provisions of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 make it even better. If North Carolina expands Medicaid, the federal government will increase its payments for the state’s current Medicaid population by 5 percent for two years. That would be worth about $1.7 billion to North Carolina.
Care4Carolina, a coalition of health care organizations, economic development groups and advocates for patients and families, has pushed in vain for Medicaid expansion since 2015. Now Erica Palmer Smith, the coalition’s executive director, said the impasse may end. “I do believe we will see a North Carolina solution put forward and voted on in this legislative session,” she told the Editorial Board.
The sticking point is the state House. Republican conservatives there see providing health insurance as a handout that should come with a work requirement, a restriction that the Biden administration won’t allow.
Leighton Ku, a George Washington University professor of health policy who has researched the benefits of expanding Medicaid in North Carolina, said it’s a misconception to see extending the program as giving money to the poor. “When you give somebody Medicaid, they don’t become richer,” he said. “You’re just providing medical care for them.”
Some Republicans also worry that adding hundreds of thousands of people to Medicaid could burden the state should the federal government lower its 90 percent share of the extra costs. But the federal share is part of federal law. To lower it, members of Congress would have to vote to reduce payments to their own states.
In the near term, North Carolina would actually save money because the American Rescue Plan’s boost in current federal Medicaid funding would be greater than what the state would pay for expansion. Ku estimates the savings at $341 million. In addition, he said, expansion would create about 83,000 jobs in the state, about half in health care and half in other sectors.
The Affordable Care Act – along with its provisions for Medicaid expansion – now has the support of most Americans. It’s not going away. Meanwhile, multiple studies have shown that providing more low-income people access to health care has improved the treatment of chronic conditions and reduced cancer deaths and infant mortality.
For years, North Carolina has turned away billions of dollars in federal health care aid. and the cost has been more than money. People have suffered and died unnecessarily because they lacked access to treatments that Medicaid would have provided.
It’s time for North Carolina to expand Medicaid.
Winston-Salem Journal. February 28, 2022.
Editorial: For fair elections, bring in the refs
Look. We just want elections to be fair. We want voters to vote and we want the candidates who get the most votes to win their offices and get to work for the people.
We suspect that most North Carolinians want that, too.
It is when you’re a Republican legislator who is more concerned about party and power than representing the will of the people in your state. Because of a few who are determined to fight their cause — gerrymandered maps that retain an unjust electoral advantage — to the bitter end, the U.S. Supreme Court will now have to weigh in.
Unfortunately, that still leaves our state at risk.
To recap briefly: After the N.C. Supreme Court last month declared the Republican-led legislature’s maps for U.S. House and General Assembly districts to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered — evidence presented at a trial showed the congressional district map was “a result of intentional, pro-Republican partisan redistricting” — Republicans were ordered to redraw and resubmit them, which they did.
Though they left much to be desired, the court still accepted the General Assembly map. But the court rejected the congressional district map, which it then redrew, relying on the recommendations of special, nonpartisan masters whose only job was to be fair.
The redrawn congressional district map reduced the expected Republican advantage from 10 out of 14 seats to a more likely seven out of 14 — with six likely to be won by Democrats and the 14th a toss-up.
That seems about right for a state in which Democrats, Republicans and independent voters are roughly equal in number. Of course, partisans on both the left and the right still groused; either the redrawn map went too far or didn’t go far enough. Nevertheless, the court had ruled, which finally cleared the way for potential candidates to file — or not file — and begin making their cases to the voters. All seemed settled until late Friday, when Republican legislators filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the court to restore its previous gerrymandered congressional district map. So even while candidates file for their parties’ primaries in May, they do so knowing that the table could be upturned once again.
These Republican legislators, incidentally, make no pretense that their map was fair — we’re far beyond that. They say, rather, that the state constitution allows them to be unfair. Their stated objection in their filing to the Supreme Court is to the process — to their maps going from their greedy hands to the court’s. “If a redistricting process more violative of the U.S. Constitution exists, it is hard to imagine it,” they wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court.
On its surface, their appeal seems too desperate to even try. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that state courts should be the presiding authority when it comes to partisan gerrymandering cases and federal courts should stay out.
North Carolina legislators are essentially asking the court to override its own decision.
“We are confident this specious attempt to undermine our judiciary will be rejected,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer representing Common Cause in the litigation, said in a news release. Unfortunately, the current U.S. Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, has also exhibited a lack of what we might call “judicial restraint.” It has overruled long-standing constitutional precedent in several prominent cases. And early in February, the court overruled an Alabama state court that tried to block a gerrymandered map that reduces Black representation. We can’t help feeling a little trepidation for a court that is so unpredictable and inconsistent.
We hope we’re wrong even to consider the possibility of an unjust ruling.
All of this could be avoided if our state utilized the type of independent redistricting commissions that other states use. No system is perfect, but surely putting these decisions in nonpartisan hands would be a vast improvement over allowing legislators, Democrat or Republican, to choose their own voters. Only eight states currently use independent redistricting for congressional seats; 14 for their state legislatures. Other states use hybrid systems.
In Michigan, which placed redistricting in the hands of a citizen-led, independent commission in 2018, surveys show a majority of voters approve of the results.
It’s simply absurd to allow players to referee their own games, especially with such high stakes — and with players who have such sharp disagreements over the rules of the game. We need real referees. However the matter is settled this year, we can expect disputes following the next round of redistricting and the one after that and the one after that. Until we finally wise up.
Greensboro News & Record. February 27, 2022.
Editorial: A new attack on teachers
Teaching has always been a challenging profession. Public school teachers have regularly had to deal with low pay and limited resources.
There also have been onerous testing regimens and a misleading school grading system that has stigmatized and demoralized entire schools.
More recently, teachers’ workloads and responsibilities have increased as they’re expected to provide social services and security to their students.
Then came COVID, leading to increased stress and unwarranted attacks from some misinformed parents who thought they knew better than medical professionals what safety protocols everyone’s children should be required to follow.
You could hear the frustration in the voice of Guilford County Schools Superintendent Sharon Contreras in January as she was about to announce her departure at the end of this school year.
“We’ve become petty,” she said. “We’re combative. We don’t listen to one another.”
Now teachers have to deal with Republican legislators who want to harass and control them by passing bills limiting what they can and can’t teach — in many cases, under threat of severe penalty.
In North Carolina, Rep. Hugh Blackwell (R-Burke) is pushing an “academic transparency” bill that would require teachers to post online lesson plans used in classrooms, including “textbooks, videos, lesson plans, digital materials” — a requirement that would likely provide ammunition for another wasteful culture war.
Parents can already access the material that each grade covers. The guidelines have been established by the N.C. Department of Instruction and are widely available online.
This might seem a mild, isolated incident, a failure of legislators to “read the room,” if it weren’t for the fact that it folds so neatly into other Republican attacks on public education across the nation.
More than 150 bills have been introduced in 39 states this last year that would restrict the teaching of certain curricula, mostly on issues of race and gender. In some of the laws being pushed, parents could sue teachers and school districts if they’re unhappy about curriculum choices.
The language in many of these bills is overly broad and would be difficult to adjudicate. Many would almost certainly be tossed by courts.
None of that is likely to matter to the Republicans who write them. In fact, that’s not the point. They’re counting on parents angered over school curricula to help them win this year, Insider reported last week. “I think that we are looking at a moment where we have the potential to build the biggest bloc of single-issue voters in the history of American politics,” Ian Prior, executive director of Fight for Schools, which is pushing for more parental control over school curricula, told attendees at the conservative CPAC conference on Thursday.
This is all occurring as these highly educated, caring, intuitive professionals face pressures like never before. A recent poll conducted by the National Education Association found that 90% of its members say that feeling burned out is a serious problem, 86% have seen more teachers quitting or retiring early since the pandemic began and 80% say that job openings that remain unfilled have added to the workloads of those who are still teaching.
Don’t be surprised if the situation worsens. Our state’s Republican-led legislature has worked hard to maintain an adversarial relationship with public schools, most recently refusing to obey a court order to add an additional $5.6 billion to public education funding through 2028. At the same time, it supports siphoning tax money from public schools to give to private schools with lower standards of accountability. Attacking educators over school curricula for votes is likely an irresistible temptation.
Hey, something has to make up for those lost gerrymandered districts.
Now is the time for parents of all political persuasions to express their support for educators — not just privately to the teachers they know and appreciate, but to our legislators in Raleigh. Tell them to stop harassing teachers and support them instead.
And vote accordingly in November, by supporting the candidates who will improve public education, not starve and smear it and sap the spirits of its greatest champions: front-line teachers.
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