Disingenuous Ads Don't Hide Health Care Agenda

One of the first misleading ads that Scott Walker launched during this recall campaign season, was the one that showcased a phony conversation on health care.  If you are paying attention to Walker's actual positions on the issue, your disingenuous meter may have shattered from shock.  You really have to assume that Walker is overcompensating for his extreme agenda and major shortcomings in the area of health care.

In Walker's patented phony style, he says that his administration spent over $1.2 billion on health care.  However that increased spending happened in spite of him not because of him and for him to try and take credit is completely ridiculous and totally self-serving.  Walker's budget initially proposed $500 million in cuts in health care programs that serve some 1.2 million Wisconsinites (by the way, I find it creepy that he proposed these cuts while at the same time increasing funeral funds for people on Medicaid). Here are a number of additional points that put Walker's statement in its actual context:

• His original plan would have translated into 65,000 people being cut off from BadgerCare and half of them would have been children.  
• Walker's original plan was rejected by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services but even his alternative stands to force out 17,000 participants. 
• Walker originally proposed freezing enrollments in the Family Care program. Later he disingenuously announced that he was removing that freeze without mentioning that the feds ordered him to do so.
• Walker planned on cutting $20 million from the Senior Care program but even his most reliable Republican rubber stamps in the legislature wouldn't go along with that plan. 
• Even with all of Walker's harsh cuts on health care, the state's projected Medicaid deficit through June 2013 is $82 million.
• Walker also had to pay more for health care programs because A. simple health care inflation and B. To cover previous funds that were provided by the federal stimulus. 

Again, the bottom line is that the increase in spending on health care was done in spite of Walker not because of him.  Although he is trying to sugarcoat his radical agenda on health care now, he will certainly revisit it if he is not removed from office on June 5th.