The Support the Dream Defenders group at Daily Kos has an ongoing FOIA Project to put pressure on Red State governors who Refuse to Expand Medicaid. We think that the refusal is blithely murderous and makes zero economic sense.
1. RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM.
The problem we want to correct is this: The national media has all but ignored the issue. This despite a Harvard Study indicating as many as 17,000 people will die annually because of the Refusal to Expand Medicaid. At the same time, we have witnessed colossal cacophonies raised because of the murders of four people in Benghazi, about 3,001 people during 9/11 and 9,840 deaths from Ebola during its latest outbreak.
As you can see, Republican Governors are quite a bit more destructive than the Ebola Virus, al Qaeda and Libyan Militias combined.
"It is clear by now that Republican Governors have decided that an excellent vantage point from which to thumb their noses at President Obama would be atop a pile of dead bodies."
2. BUT THE PROBLEM'S EVEN BIGGER THAN THAT.
As dire as that Harvard Study is about the deadly consequences to tens of thousands of the working poor who earn a little too much to qualify for Medicaid, but who don't earn enough to buy a Bronze Plan and feed their families, it still doesn't tell the whole story. The four million or so people who would be helped by Expanding Medicaid, many of whom have undiagnosed or untreated heart conditions, high blood pressures, diabetes, and cancers, also have to deal with the pain caused by those conditions and others--sometimes on a daily basis--as well as deal with the fear that the next cough or lump or tremor will land them in the emergency room and then in bankruptcy court or worse.
3. HOW TO HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
To put pressure on the media to put pressure on Republican Governors, we thought we would ask a few "Catch-22" questions of the governors. We decided to do this using Freedom of Information Act (or Public or sometimes "Open" Records, depending upon the state) requests. Here is what Snotty will get in the next couple of hours:
1. Any and all public records, as that term is described in the Wisconsin Open Records Law (§ 19.31 et seq.), reporting on or describing the Office of the Governor of Wisconsin's actions, specific initiatives, programs, orders, requests or pronouncements created or done in order to track the number of deaths caused, or potentially caused, by the Governor of Wisconsin's refusal to Expand Medicaid.
2. Any and all public records, as that term is described in the Wisconsin Open Records Law (§ 19.31 et seq.), reporting on or describing the Office of the Governor of Wisconsin's actions, specific initiatives, programs, orders, requests or pronouncements created or done in order to track the number of personal bankruptcies in Wisconsin caused, or potentially caused, by the Governor of Wisconsin's refusal to Expand Medicaid.
3. A summary maintained by the Office of the Governor, or maintained by other offices in the state government but available to you, as Governor, or other public officials in the Office of the Governor, showing the number of uninsured persons in the State of Wisconsin who were treated in emergency rooms or hospitals or clinics in the State of Wisconsin during the last fiscal or calendar year or twelve-month or other stated period, depending on how the record is maintained. For the purposes of this request, "uninsured" includes any person not covered by private health insurance or a form of Government sponsored care plan, which would include, but is not limited to, BadgerCare, Medicaid, VA, etc.
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As you can see, the first two requests are basically "Catch-22" questions. However Governor Walker responds, he will be the bad guy. (Moreover, we expect that the Governor doesn't give a shit about how many people he is bankrupting and killing, so we expect that he will not have documents responsive to those two requests.). We are counting on the fact that murderers almost never
seek out the evidence of their murders. We have already received responses from South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and, as expected, she could not care less about the people dying in her state.
4. THE NEXT STEP.
What we want to do with these responses, once we have received them from all of the GOP governors is to hand them over to Rachel Maddow or Melissa Harris-Perry, or failing that, to al Jazeera America or the Associated Press. The stories, as they say, write themselves.
Members of Support the Dream Defenders have already been on netroots radio, on the Justice and Wink After Show, and we hope to return there to publicize our findings. Additionally, JoanMar's group has done a lot via crowdsourcing. We know you have great ideas out there. Let's hear'em in the comments.
5. ECONOMICS.
Governor Walker thought he would play a sneaky shell game in Wisconsin with Medicaid Expansion. But, finally, even the local media has caught on. This is from an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
"Wisconsin would have saved $206 million over two years if the Walker administration had chosen to accept a full expansion of federal funding for BadgerCare, according to a new nonpartisan report. The state could have saved more than $500 million over 31/2 years, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates, and about 87,000 more adults a month would have been served under BadgerCare Plus.
When you add that bit of economics with the following set of numbers from a more recent piece carried by
USA Today, you can see that Wisconsin's situation is growing desperate:
"... Medicaid costs have skyrocketed. The state Department of Health Services has requested an additional $760 million just to maintain current coverage."
NOW FOR THE FUN: TRACK OUR FOIA REQUEST TO SNOTTY'S DOOR!
The United States Postal Service has a tracking tool that lets you follow your package or certified letter as it gambols across the country. (Yes, I know that Pizza Hut has one as well.). Here's a screenshot of the USPS tracking of our FOIA request early Monday morning:
You, too, can track our certified mail request using a tool provided by the United States Postal Service at this link. There is a great deal of satisfaction in using the Government (Free Speech), the Government (Open Records Laws) and the Government (the United States Postal Service) to send a bloody nose half-way across the country to such a snotty anti-Government murdering little weasel.
#LetOurPoorPeopleLive
Progress Report:
We will officially upgrade our green chart in Friday's diary, March 13. For now, here is a sneak preview:
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About Support the Dream Defenders
Members of the Daily Kos group Support the Dream Defenders invigorate three ongoing projects:
1. We coalesced to support the Dream Defenders in Florida and their mission, our first project and the origin of our name. The Dream Defenders defend the Dream of Martin Luther King Jr. by "develop(ing) the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power; building alternative systems and organizing to disrupt the structures that oppress our communities." Please donate here.
2. Our Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, crowd-sourced at Daily Kos in the fall of 2014. This bill quickly gained the support of the NAACP and the ACLU. The NAACP forwarded our bill to members of Congress, and we distributed it to members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other progressive members of Congress. President Obama signed into a law a small piece of our bill in December 2014. Our state version of the MBOPRA is currently in committee in the Kansas legislature.
3. Our Freedom of Information Act project. Nineteen Republican governors chose to kill poor people by not expanding Medicaid. Ebola has killed about 9000 people in total; Republican governors kill 17,000 people PER YEAR by refusing federal support for Medicaid, a story ignored by traditional media. Our project forces those governors to out themselves, clapping them in a Catch 22. We will publicize our results through progressive media. We now only need volunteers in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
More information about STTDs here.
This is a community diary.
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Again, Gratitude!
Thanks to JoanMar, 2thanks, JekyllnHyde, elenacarlena and the rest of the good folks at Support the Dream Defenders for taking up this issue and helping out the working poor. Their efforts have been tireless, and their results, brilliant. I will be happy to volunteer for assignments in the future. Thanks! For more information about joining Support the Dream Defenders or volunteering on the FOIA Project, please send JoanMar a message here. Thanks also to the more than 700 Kossacks who have supported our action diaries in the past six months by Reccing and/or Tipping them. And many of those also left substantive supportive messages which we listened to.