The Koch brothers’ heartless crusade to block Medicaid expansion and deny health care access to low-income Americans just keeps rolling on. Monday, Americans For Prosperity-North Carolina director, Donald Bryson, and AFP policy analyst, Akash Chougule, penned an op-ed calling on Gov. McCrory to ignore renewed pressure to expand Medicaid.
In the op-ed, Americans For Prosperity’s callousness is on full display. Not only does AFP find the costs of Medicaid expansion to North Carolina taxpayers unacceptable (even though studies show it would save the state billions), but they have trouble even conceiving that there would be any merit at all in providing an affordable health insurance option to working North Carolinians:
And what would we be paying for? Nothing that should comfort taxpayers. Potentially crowding out funding for roads and schools for the return on investment we would receive from Medicaid expansion would be ludicrous.
Their utter lack of empathy is almost as breathtaking as their hypocrisy. For AFP-NC to claim they are worried about crowding out funding for schools is beyond parody. The truth is that Americans For Prosperity backed Speaker Thom Tillis and a budget that threatened 13,000 education jobs. Then they paraded around the state championing Gov. McCrory and Speaker Tillis’s 2013 budget overhaul that gashed $500 million school funding and left the state in crisis. In fact, guess who Pat McCrory hired to write that budget? Art Pope — a man who literally had to resign his post as one of AFP’s national directors to take the job.
To recap, AFP-NC had no problem slashing half a billion dollars in education funding in order to give massive tax cuts to the rich, but when it comes to providing health care access to low-income folks, children, and people with disabilities, suddenly they’re worried about financially squeezing schools, even though expanding Medicaid would actually save the state money.