Republican Revisionist History on Medicaid Debacle

Our friend Niki Kelly, friend of the show, is with us each week. And one of the things I like about Capital Chronicle is they have a very clear delineation between their opinion pieces and their news pieces. Niki Kelly, who leads the Capital Chronicle, also writes an opinion piece once a week or so. Different from her straight reporting, it’s clearly an opinion piece, and that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with regular reporters writing opinion pieces as long as it’s clear, hey, this is an opinion of mine. She wrote this opinion piece over at Indiana Capital Chronicle about errors with Medicaid, and she kind of did a deep dive on what exactly has caused Medicaid to be in the position it’s in. I mean, it’s a dumpster fire. Medicaid is a massive expense for our state. It is doing horribly. It is way underwater. And the state has tried to find hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to cut over the past couple of years because they can’t pay the bills. So she went into this because the Republicans have tried to paint it all as, hey, it’s a bunch of people committing fraud. And Niki Kelly was like, look — and she did not word it like this, this is my own interpretation — that’s sort of an easy way out. It’s an easy way out because there are all sorts of things that go into Medicaid not working efficiently, Medicaid not producing the results it needs, Medicaid serving people who shouldn’t be served or not serving the people it needs to serve, that aren’t necessarily malicious. There are errors in the system itself in which nobody intended to hurt somebody or intended to hurt the taxpayers. It’s just government. Look, government doesn’t run anything well. Can you guys tell me anything in the U.S. government where you’re like, that’s done really well, those guys do an awesome job, I get a phenomenal value for my money for that? I know some people will say the U.S. military. Yes, of course our brave fighting men and women are phenomenal. But does anybody think the military has really done things in a cost-effective manner? You start plowing through the expenses of the U.S. military, and does anybody think you couldn’t find a whole bunch of things where you’d say that is a colossal waste of our money? The answer is probably no. Maybe you can find something here or there, but by and large the government itself does not run efficiently. And do you know why the government is not run efficiently? Let me give you an example, because you see this in corporations too. People say to Jason and myself all the time, man, your show looks awesome. Man, this is great. I can’t believe you guys put this together this fast. And I say, well, the reason is we’re passionate about it. It’s our names on the line. It’s our money on the line. My money is on the line. If we don’t do this right, we’re going to starve. If we don’t do this right, you won’t watch. If you don’t watch, if you don’t like it, you’re not going to tell our advertisers. You’re not going to support the show. You’re not going to hit the support button and give us money like the generous people have this past week over at RobKendallShow.com. We have to produce or this fails. So you’re damn right we’re going to make it look good. We’ve got some backgrounds in this stuff. We kind of know what we’re doing. The content is good. Jason wouldn’t have done this with just anybody. Maybe we’ll ask him about that later. I don’t mean to put words in his mouth, but he chose to do this with me. He’s great at making all this stuff look good. I do good content. We agreed to work together because we knew we could make it work. We have pride in our work. Our names are on the line. So yeah, it does look really good because we want to do something good for you. Now compare that to government, or compare it to other corporations where whose name isnt really on the line, especially in any kind of behind-the-scenes manner? Nobody’s. It’s nameless. It’s faceless. And by the way, even if people’s names are on the thing, if it fails they’re not out anything because they work for a corporation, and in the midst of a corporation one issue or another is just another thing. That’s why sole proprietors and small business owners, no matter the field, are always running more efficiently and more effectively in almost every case. Because it’s their money. It’s their business. It’s their name. They have pride in the thing. They have ownership in the thing. Whatever the industry is, the smaller it is, the smaller it’s owned, it almost always works more efficiently, more effectively, better, because there’s a name attached to it, there’s pride attached to it, there’s a reputation attached to it. So in the case of government, that’s the ultimate version of this. It’s a mega-corporation on steroids. There’s no accountability with that. And this is not an indictment of people working in government. There are many fine people who work in government. They try very hard. They do a very good job. They do the best they can. But with 99 percent of people, you’re never going to take as much pride in something you just work at as something your name is attached to, your livelihood is attached to, your reputation is attached to. And so in the case of government, with no ill intent, of course there are going to be mistakes. And of course it’s not going to be scrutinized the way it should be. Why? Because it’s not those people’s money. It’s not their livelihood. It’s not their reputation. Oh, we screwed up and there were millions of dollars in mistakes? Well, we’ll get it better next time. Why? Because there’s a government taxpayer backstop. The government can’t go out of business. Look at the story we led our show with yesterday. Diego Morales, the Indiana Secretary of State, wasting all that money on those vehicle reports that didn’t get used. He bought 120,000 vehicle reports, and just a little over 2,000 of them got used. Well over $300,000 of your money got flushed down the toilet. Why did he do that? Because it’s not his money. He didn’t earn it. He doesn’t have to be accountable for it. He just participated in a legalized vote-buying operation, and I’m sure in his mind he feels good because 2,150 people or whatever the number was got this service and they think better of him because he quote-unquote gave it to them. That’s government. So yeah, there are going to be all sorts of mistakes in any government program, especially one as massive and hard to prove as Medicaid. Now the quote I want to read you — and again, everybody should go read Niki Kelly’s article. She does a deep dive over at Indiana Capital Chronicle. It is an opinion piece, it’s in the opinion section, but I think there are a lot of interesting stats and views on why Medicaid is so poorly run. By the way, Niki Kelly estimated in her piece — and I did a little math and put these two things together — that the state’s inability to properly implement SNAP, which is the food program, and Medicaid, which is the health insurance program, could cost Indiana as much as $2.2 billion by 2028. Because now the federal government, last year under the big beautiful bill, has put all of these requirements on the states, what they call error rates. There is only a certain level of error rate in which mistakes — essentially giving the service to people who shouldn’t be getting it — will be tolerated. Anything above that, the state has to pay for. Now the state is on the hook for its own incompetence, where before it really wasn’t. And so now Niki Kelly is estimating, me putting the math together from her numbers, that the state by 2028 — us as taxpayers by 2028 — when we say the state will be on the hook for $2.2 billion, could be annually on the hook for $2.2 billion because the state can’t get its act together and is giving away services to people who shouldn’t be getting them. That is staggering. The incompetence of the state of Indiana under Republicans, by the way, under Republican supermajorities, and how much that could cost us as taxpayers — read the article for yourself. But I did want to read one specific quote. It comes from Chris Garten. Chris Garten is a senator from Charlestown. He’s a Republican. He sort of wrote the bill this year dealing with more Medicaid reforms. Remember last year there was this crisis thing where they were just throwing people off left and right because they realized how short they were, something like $500 million they had to come up with? And I want to read you this quote from Chris Garten and then talk about it, because I think it’s very revealing. Chris Garten was sort of the author of the bill this year, one of the leaders of the bill this year that dealt with Medicaid reform: “With Medicaid costs exploding by an unsustainable $5 billion over just four years, we have a fiscal and moral duty to stop the bleeding. We are restoring integrity to the system to ensure that these programs remain solvent and available for Hoosiers who truly need them, while shutting the door on fraud and inefficiency.” You hear that quote and you think, man, Indiana’s been a real dumpster fire with Medicaid. Boy, whoever ran that organization so horribly should totally be thrown out. I agree. What Chris Garten won’t tell you, what Chris Garten won’t mention, what Chris Garten won’t acknowledge, is that it’s him and his buddies, the Republicans in the General Assembly, along with a Republican governor, who caused the issue. He’s making that quote as though he just discovered it. He’s making that quote as though there’s some nefarious actor. Remember, go back to the first segment we talked about with Braun and Turning Point USA. There’s always some ill that only the Republicans can come in and solve. That’s how he’s framing this. Look at this horrible thing that’s happening. We have to fix this. Well, Senator Garten, you and your Republican colleagues, primarily by doing nothing, as the Republican governor did, are the reason Medicaid is in this position. It didn’t happen accidentally. It didn’t happen by chance. It happened because the Republicans during Covid, with Eric Holcomb at the helm, entered into a mass legalized vote-buying operation in which — again, deflection, deception, recurring themes, right? Are we hearing this again? Does this sound familiar? Because Eric Holcomb wanted to shut down, and the big scam, the big con, was to make you think that you could shut society down and not have lasting, long-term, seemingly probably irreversible ramifications. We’re going to bribe everyone. Legalized vote-buying. Legalized bribery in the thing. If you just participate in this ridiculousness, everything will be okay. So what did the government do in many fields? They just started throwing money at you. Literally. Remember those checks that showed up? People like me were screaming at the time, this is going to be horrible. Horrible. Think of what this will do to inflation. Think about how this is going to make everything more expensive forever. Oh, you want grandma to be in danger. That was the response to people like me. Sit down and shut up. You don’t understand. And by the way, all Republicans voted for this. I think Thomas Massie was the only Republican in the beginning not to vote for this. Maybe there were a few others, I can’t remember. But for the most part, the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House and Senate, and the president who signed it into law, created this where they printed trillions and trillions of dollars. And what happened? Inflation. And it’s still happening. And it’s not getting any better. Prices are still skyrocketing. Massive disruptions to the economy. Housing, etc. Irreversible. We were right about that. One of the legalized vote-buying operations was this: we want you to believe that we can shut down your business, shut down the company you work for, make you stay at home — which means you’re going to lose your insurance or your means to purchase health insurance — and we’ll just give it to you. Sweet Daddy Holcomb is going to ride to the rescue. Eric Holcomb is going to step in and say, there, there, you’re on Medicaid now, because what did you do? You were a good boy. You were a good girl. You hunkered down. Here’s your basically free insurance. You’re welcome. Of course it was preposterous. It was a lie. It was a scam. And not one person, including Chris Garten, said a word about it. Nobody was holding rallies at the Statehouse. None of these lawmakers were leading the fight in 2021 when they all convened and got back together. Nobody was demanding special sessions to say we’ve got to stop this. No one did a damn thing about it. Eric Holcomb was allowed to do this over years of time. And so what did he do? He put a bunch of able-bodied people on the Medicaid rolls who should have been working, who should have been producing in society, who should have been getting benefits from their employers. Of course, he shut their employer down so they couldn’t. And then those people believed they were entitled to it. Once you give someone something, trying to take it away — oh, they’re going to raise holy hell. And so what the Republicans in Indiana basically said, both the governor and the General Assembly, which is supposed to oversee him as well, was this: as long as the federal government keeps backing it up, I guess we should keep doing it because we don’t want to piss these people off. We got them convinced that there were no ramifications for shutting the world down. And now we’ve been giving it to them, so I guess as long as the government is willing to pay 90 percent freight, or 100 percent freight in some cases, whatever it was, let’s just keep doing it. Well, of course the federal government eventually stepped up and said, hey, the scam has lasted long enough. We’re going to shut the magical money-printing factory off now because inflation is really out of control and we have to finally acknowledge we can’t do this forever. So what happened then? The states had to start picking up more and more of the tab. Now couple that with the federal government — because they’re broke too, $35 trillion in debt — saying, hey states, not only are we not going to pick up the tab like we once did, if we catch you letting freeloaders on the system, we’re going to charge you for it. So all of these people — Republicans, by the way, at the state level and the federal level — who were in on this scam together, who knew what they were doing, because you’d have to have an IQ of seven not to realize how this was going to end, are now in a mass panic because they have to kick all these people they put on the Medicaid rolls off the Medicaid rolls. But they can’t acknowledge what they did, because then you might get wise to it. Of course, you’re not hearing this anywhere else other than right here. This is why we’re so popular. This is why they hated us. This is why they feared us. Because we don’t care about anybody but you. We don’t like the politicians. We don’t want to be friends with them. We exist to serve you. That’s why they were so mean to us. That’s why they said all the horrible things about us. They could never refute what we said, but they would call us names, talk bad about us, and try to get me fired. Everybody knows about all that stuff that went on for all those years where they would call and say mean things to my bosses about me. Not because I was saying things that weren’t true, but because I was being very direct and treating them with the lack of respect they deserved for how they were handling your money, for the disrespect they had for you. Well, now we’re here. And I guess unless they can figure out how to control the internet, we can say these things. We can point this out. We can point out how Republicans in Indiana were being complete hypocrites, espousing less government, lower government, better government, lower taxes, while doing the exact opposite. Medicaid. The HIP program. What Holcomb did during Covid with express written consent by inaction from people like Chris Garten in the General Assembly was a scam. It was a scheme. It was a lie. And they all knew it. And now people like Chris Garten want you to think they’re doing something to fix the problem they created, while never acknowledging that they created the problem.