Utah Senate: No Interest in Banning Medicaid Expansion

Governor Herbert may not be required to break out his "veto pen" after all; and at least one lame-brained Utah legislative "message bill" stands to get "killed" before it becomes a national embarrassment.

Good news from the Salt Lake Tribune this morning for opponents of  Utah House Rep. Jake Anderegg's   ill-considered HB391, which would in the final days before the close of the 2013 legislation session summarily "shut off the possibility of tapping into federal funding for expanding Medicaid to cover an estimated 131,000 uninsured, low-income Utahns," and additionally thwart Governor Herbert's better-reasoned approach of carefully studying the Affordable Care Act's true fiscal impact by means of an already-commissioned cost/benefits study to be conducted over the course of the next few months.

Although this bill successfully sailed through the State House yesterday by a lop-sided 46-27 margin, amidst much "weeping, quoting of scripture and other asinine tea-party-style fanfare," a similar fate does not await the bill in the Senate, about which Trib columnist Robert Gehrke remarks that the bill has "landed" with a resounding "thud":

• Utah Senate: No interest in banning Medicaid expansion

"I’m not advocating for Medicaid expansion. I’m advocating for: Let’s follow a timeline. Let’s follow a process. We have three more years to make a decision. Why do we want to make it in the last three days of the session?" said Senator Todd Weiler (R-Woods Cross) in a statement following yesterday's Senate Republican closed caucus, in which there was "no support for the bill," according to Senate Majority Leader Ralph Okerlund, (R-Monroe)

Weiler added that he doesn’t expect Andregg's bill to get heard on the Senate floor, but he's drafted amendments "just in case it does," which "would allow the state to expand Medicaid after the completion of a state Department of Health-commissioned study of the issue and a report from the Health Systems Reform Task Force on Utah’s charity care system," in direct contradiction to the provisions of Anderegg's HB391.

It thus appears at this juncture, if all goes well, that the Governor Herbert may not be required to break out his "veto pen" after all, and wonder of wonders; at least one lame-brained Utah legislative "message bill" stands to get "killed" before it becomes a national embarrassment.