Moderate Republicans abandon efforts on Medicaid/KanCare expansion

KanCare expansion – an effort to provide health care to 150,000 uninsured working Kansans – failed late on May 4 as moderate Republican members of the Kansas House of Representatives abandoned a bipartisan effort to force a vote on the issue in the Senate.

A coalition of Democrats, moderate Republicans, and even some conservative rural Kansas representatives vowed to hold the budget hostage until Senate President Susan Wagle and Majority Leader Jim Denning allowed the full Senate to vote on HB 2066, the bill that would expand KanCare.

While more than 70% of Kansans and majorities in both the House and Senate support expansion, four recalcitrant legislators – Wagle, Denning, House Speaker Ron Ryckman, and House Majority Leader Dan Hawkins – oppose it and have used their power to control what bills will be allowed to be debated to stymie the will of the Legislature and the electorate.

When the House dug in on the issue, voting repeatedly to not adopt the budget but send it back to conference, Wagle, Denning, Ryckman and Hawkins tried to punish them by cutting vital parts of the budget. Their tactic didn’t work. But neither would Wagle nor Denning allow a vote.

Eventually Denning promised that the Senate would take the issue up in January of next year. With this “promise,” moderate House Republicans abandoned the effort and voted to approve the budget leaving only the Democrats along with moderate Republican Diana Dierks and conservative Republicans Jesse Burris, Randy Garber, Michael Houser, and Trevor Jacobs voting NO. Garber and Jacobs represent communities (Horton and Fort Scott respectively) in which hospitals have been forced to close in part due to the state’s failure to expand KanCare.

Sadly, the working poor now have their fate in the hands of a man, Jim Denning, who has suggested to the press that insurance isn’t that helpful (he says his wife almost died and she has insurance) and that the poor can just go to the emergency room if they have a problem. And Denning has used his position as Majority Leader to fight against expansion at every turn. Yet, we are supposed to trust that he will make sure it comes up for a vote in January.

While HB 2066 – the expansion bill – has passed the House and so continues to be “alive” for the 2020 session, we can expect Denning and the other anti-expansion leaders in the Senate to seek the addition of “poison pills” to the bill in their attempt to kill it. And of course the addition of just one amendment to the bill would make it subject to a conference committee which would be made up of four anti-expansion Republicans and two pro-expansion Democrats.

Given Denning’s “promise,” this would be our expectation – that the Senate put HB 2066 on the floor for a vote in January and that the bill will be on the Governor’s desk for her signature by February 1. This is only possible if Denning keeps his word and if moderate Republicans stand up firmly and demand that Wagle, Denning, Ryckman, and Hawkins stop their obstructionism.

Multi-National Corporations are the big winners

Picking winners and losers in the actions of this Legislature is easy.

The working poor lost – they will go at least another year without health care.

Multi-national corporations and the highest earning individuals are the winners. At the end of the session, the House and Senate adopted HB 2033, a somewhat watered down version of the massive corporate tax cut vetoed earlier in the session by Governor Laura Kelly. The bill will cost the state about $245 million over three years.

Some in the Legislature are trying to focus on a provision in the bill dealing with sales tax on groceries. Don’t be fooled – while this bill could reduce the sales tax on food, it is not guaranteed because a reduction in the food sales tax is tied to increases in collections of the compensating use tax. It those collections go up, the food sales tax might come down. If all the assumptions made in crafting the bill turn out to be correct, the food sales tax could drop from 6.5% today to 6.0% in 2021 and then to 5.4% in 2022.

So the bill contains guarantees for multi-national corporations and wishes for the rest of us. But it passed 83 to 41 in the House with one Republican (Pannbacker) voting NO and one Democrat (Pittman) voting YES and 27 to 13 in the Senate with two Republicans (Pilcher-Cook and Skubal) joining all the Democrats in voting NO.

We have yet to see if Governor Kelly vetoes this bill or not.