By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – Mike Braun and Joe Donnelly just played a fun little game of tit for tat.

Braun, the Republican challenger for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat, kicked things off. His campaign argued that Donnelly, the Democratic incumbent, had violated campaign laws. Donnelly’s staff had posted a short video of him meeting with President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Braun’s campaign said the video could be used for political purposes and therefore was a no-no.

A few days passed. Then Donnelly’s camp responded in kind. Braun had recorded a six-figure personal loan from the candidate to his campaign in an improper fashion, the Donnelly team asserted. It was a violation of campaign finance laws and should be punished, they said.

In both cases, denials were issued.

Staffers and surrogates for both candidates took turns calling the other guy names.

A grand time was had by all.

What did any of this have to do with the lives of hard-working Hoosiers, otherwise known as the folks Donnelly and Braun are supposed to serve?

Zip.

Nada.

Nothing.

I have as much tolerance for campaign tomfoolery as anyone. There’s a long American tradition of gamesmanship and jockeying that makes our political contests lively.

But I also believe public servants ought to devote at least some of their time and energy when they run for office to thinking about what the people they’re supposed to serve might need.

What we’re hearing from Braun and Donnelly, though, is a lot of noise about which one of them outsourced more jobs in his business career and which is the most committed to building an expensive, unnecessary and non-productive wall along this nation’s southern border.

Meanwhile, we in Indiana are seeing something not seen before.

Employment figures in the state are robust – we’re close if not at the percentage that economists consider full employment – but the number of Hoosiers who have fallen into poverty also has increased. Just as bad, the bottom of the Indiana middle-class seems to be disappearing.

By some measures, nearly half the people in this state are in or are only one relatively mild misstep or problem away from sliding toward financial disaster and seeing the lives and lifestyles they’ve worked hard to build vanish like smoke in a stiff breeze.

History and conventional wisdom always have dictated that jobs are the antidote to poverty.

But the old rules don’t seem to apply now.

And the old bromides – skill up, get more training, pull yourself up by your bootstraps – seem emptier than ever.

Telling a Hoosier working mother or father who’s already laboring 60 or 70 hours a week at two or three different jobs just to keep the family housed and fed that she or he needs to find still more time to get additional training or schooling is to engage in duplicitous fantasy.

Both Joe Donnelly and Mike Braun like to tout their regular-guy, blue-collar credentials. They want us to believe that they understand the problems facing all those Hoosiers who tiptoe along the edge of the cliff overlooking economic and human disaster.

Or who already have taken the fall – and keep falling.

Maybe Braun and Donnelly do understand that.

The best way to demonstrate that they do is to start talking more about the challenges Hoosiers face and less about the gotcha games they seem determined to play with each other.

I know we’re trapped in an era in which the rules, such as they are, of reality television shows dominate our political discussions.

But reality TV shows are designed to entertain and distract.

What’s happening to too many Hoosiers is real and cannot be ignored.

For those Hoosiers, life isn’t a game.

It’s deadly serious business.

It would be nice if they had a senator in Washington who understands that.

Footnote: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

By Erica Irish
TheStatehouseFile.com     

INDIANAPOLIS — State health officials are developing a plan to require Medicaid and Healthy Indiana Plan recipients to work, go to school or volunteer in their communities if they want to continue to receive coverage.

An interim committee on public health tasked with studying eligibility for Indiana’s various benefits programs met to review the proposal Thursday at the Statehouse.

Allison Taylor, who serves as the state’s interim Medicaid director in partnership with the Family and Social Services Administration, introduced the committee to a rough outline of her agency’s proposed “Gateway to Work” program.

If enacted, the initiative would require Medicaid and HIP recipients to devote 20 hours per week across eight months each year to certain activities, including traditional employment, education, job skill training or community service. This could take effect as soon as July 2020, Taylor said.

“For the first time in modern history we’ve got more jobs than people to fill them,” Taylor said in her testimony. “We’ve got individuals who could really benefit from that connection between employment and health.”

As of 2015, Indiana law has required all able-bodied recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to work a minimum of 20 hours per week or 80 hours per month.

There are few exceptions to this rule, as explained by Adrienne Shields, director of the FSSA’s Division of Family Resources.

“We currently do have the opportunity to submit a waiver if there was an economic downturn for some reason at the city level, the county level, the regional level or at a statewide level,” Shields said.

Shields went on to explain that prior to the law taking effect in July 2015, her administration served around 50,000 able-bodied SNAP recipients. As of this July, just over 11,000 able-bodied Hoosiers receive SNAP benefits.

For the Gateway to Work program, Taylor estimated that around 70 percent of those covered by HIP would be exempt. Those who, for example, are medically frail, primary caregivers or have been recently incarcerated would not be a part of the initiative.

“We’re going to make sure there is every opportunity for an individual to stay in the program and take advantage of those employment and training connections,” Taylor said, a process that includes fostering healthy partnerships with sponsors through statewide tours by the agency and using more flexible means of reporting, like online and mobile platforms.

However, some parties at the hearing were blunt in voicing their opposition to the proposal.

Fran Quigley, director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic of Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law, was adamant that the program is not different enough from traditional work requirements and claimed it would prevent many low-income citizens from gaining access to healthcare.

“Thousands of Hoosiers are going to be hurt by this,” said Quigley. “Under this planned work requirement, the most vulnerable Hoosiers among us will lose healthcare. This requirement is going to create a red tape barrier between those in need and the medicines that they need, often desperately so.”

FOOTNOTE: Erica Irish is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.