Looks like Virginia’s House Republicans just sunk the progressive battleship, as leftist outlets and pressure groups across the spectrum are apoplectic with rage over the reforms — including the Indiana block grant and Kentucky workfare requirements that make the health care expansion deal the most conservative set of reforms in the nation.
Here’s a small taste from the usual malcontents whose plan to impose Bernie-style “straightforward” Medicaid expansion was — how should we say this politely — thwarted.
Don’t take our word for it though. Occupy Virginia Antifa Red Army Faction Indivisible is just outraged, simply outraged, that all they have been fighting for has come to naught:
In Virginia, the GOP is using work requirements as the “price of admission” for expanding Medicaid…. We know that work requirements don’t work; they serve only to make people jump through bureaucratic hoops to obtain the health care that they need.
In the words of the great 20th century philosopher Nelson Muntz:
What is clear at this point is that the progressives see the Republican introduction of workfare requirements as the Trojan Horse of Reform they knew it was going to be, stripping out the able bodied who are using our social safety net as a hammock across the entire spectrum of Medicaid recipients — not just within the pool of the working poor benefiting from health care expansion.
Let ’em burn.
Meanwhile, as more details about the compromise come to the light of day, the very real and substantive facts of the matter are that Virginia’s compromise — should the House version survive the Senate — will be the most conservative version of state health care reform in the nation, provided it is tinkered with only on the edges rather than in substance.
Net effect? If the Democrats are screaming bloody murder over it, there’s merit in the deal.
