I thought that my opinion of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was scraping the bottom of the barrel already. Was it not enough that, on top of trying to break the unions, he also tried to sneak through a budget provision that would (as Krugman summarizes today):
...allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.
On top of that, the person at the head of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), who would be in charge of those sweeping changes, without benefit of public hearing or input, would be one Dennis Smith, former Heritage Foundation fellow and author of this piece: Medicaid Meltdown: Dropping Medicaid Could Save States $1 Trillion.
But today my opinion of Scott Walker took an even larger dive.
I woke up to this headline in Madison's Capital Times:
Walker warns Medicaid payments to nursing homes could be delayed if bill not passed
A press statement released by Walker’s office Thursday, along with a brief memo from the Wisconsin Budget office, claims that if the budget repair bill is not soon passed, “the state will no longer be able to pay providers or vendors.”
The statement triggered a furious response from an advocacy group. “The Walker Administration is now using the 1.2 million individuals enrolled in BadgerCare and Medicaid as political hostages,” says Bobby Peterson, executive director of ABC for Health in a press release. “The Walker Administration should stop scaring and threatening the people that need health care coverage in Wisconsin. Health care should be a right NOT a bargaining chip!!”
Reporter Shawn Doherty has been doing an excellent job of covering this issue. There will be more to come today, as she reports on a Thursday protest in which people from the disabled community temporarily occupied Republican headquarters.
But I'm still not hearing enough nationwide coverage of this story. A single Sarah Palin tweet way-back-when was enough to turn the fraudulent slogan "death panels" into a nationwide firestorm. But here we have a governor who is actually threatening the most vulnerable in our society, people who rely on Medicaid for their nursing home care and more, using them as a bargaining chip in his political power-play -- and the story is spreading as slowly as molasses, utterly subsumed in the furor over the union-busting angle of the Wisconsin story.
There is no budget crisis in Wisconsin that in any way justifies the governor's proposed measures, or his tactics.
For background information on the Medicaid issue and the Wisconsin budget, all in one compact place, I've created an organized list of links that will grow as more information becomes available: WI Budget 2011: Medicaid
Please tweet, please forward, please help us get the word out! People need to know about this!