By Dan Carpenter
TheStatehouseFile.com
Gov. Mike Pence’s new health insurance proposal is potentially – potentially – good news, and there’s more good news in the reaction of some of his prominent critics, who’ve elected to accentuate the positive rather than dwell on the faults.
Faults are not hard to find. An expanded Healthy Indiana plan as laid out by Pence would be more cumbersome, more given to surprises and less generous and even less respectful toward the working poor than the broadening of Medicaid, a huge federal gift that many states, some headed by Pence’s fellow Republicans, have taken and run with.
Commentary button in JPG – no shadowWhether the state’s homegrown alternative is accepted or rejected by the federal government, months already have been lost by hundreds of thousands of uninsured Hoosiers and the hospitals that must carry those who don’t choose to go untreated. Many more months will evaporate as Pence and the feds perform their kabuki dance over Healthy Indiana, which the state was given till Dec. 31 to continue in its current, profoundly limited, form.
Still, the wall appears to have come down, even if the debris from it frustrates access to Pence on the part of those who’ve pledged to work with him to break the political stalemate that’s keeping Indiana stuck in the station. Obamacare will continue to be the anathema that rallies the GOP primary troops and applies the litmus test to presidential hopefuls such as Pence; but under whatever cover they can muster, the men and women in charge of vital services to the needy in their sovereign states are acknowledging that the Affordable Care Act is reality, is working, and is the best, essentially the only, deal in town.
Pence has been accused from the right of accepting Obamacare in everything but name and slapping some Hoosier lipstick on the pig. The more eager-to-please advocates on the other side submit that he’s at least gotten into the neighborhood of expanded Medicaid – close enough, perhaps, that the feds can get him to the point of the feds’ satisfaction. The cynics on that other side offer the worst-case scenario: that he’s bought more time, time the ailing needy in Indiana can’t afford, and will hold the Alamo with national attention until national office no longer beckons.
I prefer to think that the train is chugging, that the momentum fueled by moral obligation and no-brainer economics will not be stopped, and that Pence in some form of collaboration with Washington and the Indiana health-care industry will see his signature accomplishment as governor emulate that of the president whose name he dares not speak except in vain. Delicious irony, that. Then he can do his best Mitt Romney in the primary debates and insist he’s come up with a homegrown health-care plan that the party ought to adopt. And that’s fine, Governor. Whatever. Just get this thing done. People are dying.
Dan Carpenter is a freelance writer, contributor to The Indianapolis Business Journal and author of “Indiana Out Loud.â€
