GOP Is The Pain-and-Suffering Party

GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos continues to block federally-funded expanded health care coverage for 91,000 low-income residents.

You really need a scorecard — and a strong stomach — to track the deliberate actions that Wisconsin GOP legislators have recently taken which knowingly inflict pain and suffering on state citizens, especially those with the least resources to fight back.

* Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders sent all members home for most of 2020 with full salary and benefits without legislatively-confronting the COVID-19 crisis, fought Governor Tony Evers‘ emergency health orders, forced voters to cast ballots at polling stations while the airborne virus was surging, and were willing to trade a ten-fold increase in positive COVID-19 cases for ending masking orders.

All that and more is documented here.

* Then they sloppily cancelled $70 million a month in federally-provided emergency food aid for low-income residents and those who had lost jobs to the crisis.

The life-or-death funding was restored by the governor and federal government, not the GOP legislators who created the problem and the anxieties that went with it.

* Earlier this week the same GOP leaders refused again without debate to accept federally-funded health care insurance coverage for 91,000 state citizens, including some working for the minimum wage frozen by Republicans at $7.25/hr. yet earning just enough above the federally-defined poverty level so they do not quality for the state’s Medicaid program.

The funding to expand Medicaid would have saved state taxpayers $1.6 billion, but that’s how our state’s fake conservatives roll.

A Wisconsin physician explained what turning aside the federal funding would mean to her low-income patients:

Dr. Ann Helms, a neurologist in Brookfield, treats patients with strokes.

“So I see patients when they have no choice but to go to the hospital. The number of patients I have saying, ‘You have to discharge me, I can’t afford this. I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Dr. Helms. “They end up with catastrophic medical bills and are never able to work again. So they end up on permanent disability. Whereas, if we had been able to cover $5 of antihypertensive and a visit to the doctor twice a year, they’d be able to still be working.”

* And in their latest move the state GOP Death Cult’s leadership cut so much money from the governor’s proposed school aid budget, and played so many rule-breaking games with it, that another $1.5 billion in federally-provided COVID funding for schools is now imperiled.

Republican leaders know these decisions put people’s health, jobs, futures and lives at risk – even as COVID-19 still infects and kills state citizens – yet our taxpayer-paid public “servants” do not care.

They only care about remaining in gerrymandered-protected, benefit-laden seats where they do very little work:

The Wisconsin Legislature has been the least active full-time state legislative body in the country since states began taking measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, a WisPolitics.com review finds.

Meanwhile they concentrate on a single agenda: diminishing Gov. Evers and defeating him in a 2022 election they are busy rigging in their favor with a raft of new voting suppression laws.

It’s a disgrace.

James Rowen, a former journalist and mayoral staffer in Milwaukee and Madison, writes a regular blog, The Political Environment.