Media to N.C.–please be like Kansas

Amazing how one state does something and now our wonderful state of North Carolina must follow suit–or so the mainstream media says so. Case in point—Kansas expands Medicaid, so both the Winston-Salem Journal and the News & Observer say North Carolina should do the same.

To be fair–the N&O editorializes:

North Carolina’s refusal to expand Medicaid has always been bewildering. Now, with Kansas moving to expand, it’s becoming embarrassing.

Kansas is king when it comes to conservative state funding. In recent years, it gained national attention by going on the fiscal equivalent of a hunger strike. It cut taxes to the bone and waited for the economy to boom. Instead the state languished and even Republican lawmakers backed raising taxes.

Now penny-pinching Kansas sees the obvious value of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The federal government will pay 90 percent of the cost, rural hospitals will be able to stay afloat, health care-related jobs will be created and 150,000 low-income people will become newly eligible for health insurance.

….while the Journal writes a straight news story speculating whether or N.C. will buckle during the upcoming legislative session. JLF’s Mitch Kokai is quoted:

“The work requirements included in the Kansas package might appeal to those — especially in the N.C. House — who supported similar proposals here,” Kokai said.

However, he cautioned that “Senate leaders who have been uninterested in any version of Medicaid expansion are unlikely to change their minds, regardless of what happens in Kansas.”

Townhall’s Nic Horton picks apart the myths pushing Kansas’ march toward Medicaid expansion, notably the mistaken belief that it will save the state’s struggling hospitals. Liberals can’t seem to get it through their heads that patients paying a percentage of the costs hospitals incur absolutely will not “save” them. This is even more true when people drop private insurance to go on expanded Medicaid—so-called “crowd out”–as JLF’s Jordan Roberts points out is what’s happening in Idaho.