Today, the Close the Gap coalition announced a legislative plan to accept Medicaid expansion. The group had asked members of the SC Progressive Network to turn out for its press conference, but wouldn’t reveal who the sponsors are or details of the bill. (A notice with the senators’ names and an acknowledgement that the group was calling for privatizing Medicaid expansion went out April 13, the day before the press conference.)

Unfortunately, the original solicitation didn’t mention support for privatizing Medicaid money, pointing to Arkansas as a model to emulate. The coalition didn’t mention that Arkansas is one of a few states that received a waiver to buy private insurance for the extremely poor, rather than simply provide them with Medicaid. The stated goals of the Arkansas Health Care Independence Act are to “reduce state and federal obligations to entitlement spending” and address the “need to achieve personal responsibility” for health care – rhetoric straight from Haley’s opposition to “Obamacare.”

Network activists lobby SC lawmakers to expand Medicaid.

At our Network’s fall conference, we predicted that Gov. Nikki Haley would favor privatization, but we didn’t expect “progressive” allies asking us to support such a plan. Our position then – as now – is that privatization of poverty isn’t about helping the poor but rather about subsidizing the free market.

Our erstwhile allies think that we can’t win on principle, so they offer to settle by dealing with the opposition on their terms. Sadly, the struggle they avoid is the only way we can build the ability to win.

Our position is that privatizing health care for the extremely poor is immoral. Our position is that health care should be a right and supported by tax dollars, as is done in all industrialized democracies.

We don’t want to doom a good thing by demanding a perfect thing, but we are far from that point. If we are going to surrender, we need to talk about it first. To that end, please read this story by Michael Hilzik that ran last year in the LA Times. The piece quotes an MIT economist, who says “holdout states are “willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people.” Gruber helped design the health insurance reform in Massachusetts on which the ACA was modeled. He added: “It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.”

Brett Bursey is executive director of the SC Progressive Network. Reach him at network@scpronet.com.