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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Olympia Rob McKenna Subtracts from Budget Debate by Adding to It

Posted by Goldy on Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:51 AM

Hate to kick a man while he's down (well, no, not really), but former gubernatorial shoo-in Rob McKenna either doesn't care to understand the way the state budget works before commenting on it, or he doesn't care if he intentionally misinforms his Twitter followers for the sake of a rhetorical dig:

Didn't someone say expanded Medicaid wd SAVE $? "Shortfall grows by $301M after state miscalculates Medicaid costs" seattletimes.com/html/localnews…
— Rob McKenna (@robmckenna) March 20, 2013

Stoopid Dumbocrats, am I right?

Except McKenna is totally conflating Medicaid expansion with the state's efforts to move disabled recipients into managed care, and he's totally ignoring the fact that the state saw fewer savings than anticipated, not rising costs:

Estimates of Medicaid costs climbed substantially, for a net increase of $301 million. Lawmakers had counted on more Medicaid participants enrolling in a lower-cost managed-care program. They didn’t, so anticipated saving didn’t materialize.

So the miscalculation is not anything like how McKenna characterizes it.

This budget stuff is complicated. Too complicated to be debated via snarky one-liners on Twitter. And obviously too complicated for Rob McKenna.

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Comments (11) RSS

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Does anyone have anything positive to add to this conversation? Is there an UNBIASED source of information to review?

Posted by Just Asking on March 20, 2013 at 5:28 PM

Does anyone have anything positive to add to the conversation? Is there an UNBIASED source of information that we can refer to?

Posted by Just Asking on March 20, 2013 at 5:25 PM

@6 First of all, McKenna is dissing "expanded Medicaid." That's got nothing to do with the missed caseload forecast. The Medicaid extension is part of Obamacare, and it hasn't happened yet.

What actually happened is that the state saved $300 million less than it forecast it would save by switching disabled recipients to managed care, largely because fewer of these recipients actually ended up switching. That's what happened. So McKenna's tweet was total bullshit.

Posted by Goldy on March 20, 2013 at 4:14 PM

McKenna aside, this is exactly why I hate Twitter. You can't have any sort of meaningful conversation about a complex important topic via 140 character tweets. It just encourages idiotic and overly simplistic sound bites like this.

Posted by Reverse Polarity on March 20, 2013 at 2:37 PM

The point is that McKenna presented himself as an old-time Washington middle-of-the-road Republican. Instead, he's a rapid "modern" conservative, a wingnut, Team Rape member, who is only interested in playing to the extreme base.

Hi Kinison! Eating it up, aren't you?

Posted by Some Old Nobodaddy Logged In on March 20, 2013 at 1:02 PM

Genuinely confused here:

[The] state saw fewer savings than anticipated, not rising costs:
Estimates of Medicaid costs climbed substantially[.] [...] [Anticipated] saving didn’t materialize.

[Emphasis added.]

So Goldy is saying that it's not the case that actual costs increased, but rather that estimated costs increased because savings were lower? I'm not really sure how what Goldy quoted contradicts what McKenna said.

Posted by Ben on March 20, 2013 at 12:05 PM

So that's the losing politician's fall back position? Throwing verbal rocks via twitter? Sad.

Posted by Pope Peabrain on March 20, 2013 at 11:53 AM

@1: oh, you're still at this lol

@3: none of the allegations against FUSE were necessarily correct but McKenna was pretty consistent with the GOP party line and FUSE is a lefty org so he didn't really need to go further than that to make sense to his friends who all ate it up. V. v. entertaining performance.

Posted by Baconcat on March 20, 2013 at 10:49 AM

McKenna was also fighting with FUSE on twitter last night over college costs, which didn't make an awful lot of sense.

Posted by TheRain on March 20, 2013 at 10:44 AM

Who's this, "Rob McKenna" fellow you're complaining about, Goldy? Name doesn't ring a bell...

Posted by Mr. Happy Sunshine on March 20, 2013 at 10:11 AM

It sounds like McKenna isnt confused, he's just commenting on a Seattle Times news article. As you know, most news sites dont reference DEAD LINKS to SLOG articles as proof of anything, yet alone facts pertaining to budget shortfalls.

But by all means, continue kicking a dead horse, or consider applying for a job at Gawker, they need every snarky asshole they can get.

Posted by Kinison