Southwest Missouri's lone Democratic Rep. Sara Lampe has mixed feelings about returning for a possible special session this fall to address Medicaid issues and you can hear it in her voice.
"This reminds me of a student that didn't get his project in on time. He doesn't do the work during class all year and now comes the end of the semester and he wants extra credit." That's how Lampe is describing Governor Blunt's proposal to call a special session.
Lampe supports restoring cuts to a program for the working disabled, but she says the Governor should have taken care of Medicaid fraud within a regular legislative session.
"Didn't he tell us he was going to do the waste, fraud and abuse 2 years ago," Lampe asked. "Why didn't he do it last year?"
When I pointed out to Lampe that legislators had failed to reach an agreement on a Medicaid fraud bill, she said the Governor had the power to make substantial changes it if he wanted to. "That seems like more of a thing that involves the Governor's agencies than anything we can pass legislatively anyway," Lampe said.
"I'm ticked off that we're rushing around trying to do this now and the Democrats are being the adults in the situation and trying to do what he didn't do," Lampe said. "Democrats are having to be the parents." Democrats are circulating a petition to force a special session without the Governor's permission. Lampe said she supports it, but questions the Governor's own special session motives.
A school teacher, Lampe used another education analogy. "Now that the grades are due, everybody's in a panic to get something done, so it's going to cost the state more money. If it wasn't an election year, would we have to wait 4 years to undo what we did and help the disabled?"
2 comments:
Bottom line is the medicaid fraud issue and the program for disabled workers are not related and the Republican leadership really messed up when they linked passage of one to passage of the other. Now the Governor has further compounded the problem by linking the two in special session.
Point well taken. Thanks fiatmo. That's my mistake. Rep. Dake is another Democrat in the Ozarks and I should know after doing a story on his election victory.
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