Governor Sonny Perdue Shouldn’t Bash The Health Bill

Posted: 11:10 AM Mar 23, 2010

Governor Perdue Unhappy With Health Care Bill

Perdue says the bill would force a billion dollars of additional spending on Medicaid per year and harm small businesses by extending the Medicare tax.

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Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue issued a strong rebuke of the sweeping health care bill, calling it a “colossal unfunded mandate”.

Perdue says it would force a billion dollars of additional spending on Medicaid per year and harm small businesses by extending the Medicare tax.

Perdue said his office was investigating “any and all legal options to challenge this legislation.”

However, the Georgia House *rejected* a constitutional amendment on Monday that would have allowed Georgians to opt out of federal health mandates.

via Governor Perdue Unhappy With Health Care Bill.

From the fourteen (there will probably be more) Republican Attorneys General who have decided to sue the government of the United States to stop the implementation of the health care bill to my old Governor’s intervention into federal politics to attack efforts to reform the health care system, it’s as if every Republican politician in the country has decided to continue to protest the Democratic health care bill even after it has already passed.

What particularly irks me about Gov. Perdue is that he’s not someone who should be talking about small businesses and the state’s health care situation with any level of authority. As of March of 2009, 34 percent of Georgians under the age of 65 went without health insurance . More than three quarters of these Georgians went without health insurance for six months or longer between 2007 and 2008. It’s true that Perdue can’t be entirely blamed for these numbers — there was a gigantic recession that hit in 2008 that stripped many Georgians of their employer-provided health insurance — but at the same time, Perdue did little to help the people of the state with their health care programs. Under his watch, our successful Medicaid program called PeachCare was chipped away by private Care Management Organizations and the health and education budgets were under constant siege.

His Republican Party saw it as more important to keep taxes on the wealthy among the lowest in the country and passing a tort reform bill that did almost nothing to rein in health care costs than to attend to the needs of the millions of Georgians who lacked proper health care coverage.

Yes, there are legitimate problems with the health care legislation as it is passed. It relies far too much on private, for-profit insurance, which is a terrible model when compared to the likes of Medicare. It doesn’t take on the drug industry in allowing for the reimportation of drugs or authorizing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. And it certainly doesn’t do enough to rein in costs. But when it comes to public officials like Perdue who have done little to champion the cause of health care, they don’t have much room to criticize federal reformers when they just stepped up to the plate and helped the uninsured of Georgia in ways the Governor hasn’t even dreamed of.