Ignore naysayers, pass Medicaid integrity bill

It’s a bill that would improve matters tepidly, but you would think it heralded the end of the world from the rhetoric emanating courtesy of the far left that favors government as a redistribution machine.

SB 130 by Republican state Sen. Heather Cloud would increase moderately the oversight that the Louisiana Department of Health maintains over Medicaid eligibility: all of regular, expanded, children’s, and waiver provision of the program. It requires LDH to verify independently eligibility information, prohibits relying solely on automatic renewals (and for future waiver program operation prohibits these entirely), prohibits sole use of self-attestation to verify income and assets and mandates verification of residency, and mandates data matching use from a variety of sources on quarterly, semiannual, and annual bases.

Unfortunately, until the last couple of years since Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards had entered office, LDH didn’t often utilize these efforts listed in the bill. Vast swaths of verification occurred through self-attestation and what data-based verification did occur usually came in perfunctory form, asking for very little and skipping the finer points of eligibility requirements.

Bills would shield LA from bad energy policy

Bills moving in the Louisiana Legislature not only look to forestall potentially bad policy decisions elsewhere emanating from faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but actually to reverse the chances of these inflicting harm.

For years, Europe has demonstrated the costs, both in price and reliability, of government-subsidized or -mandated moves into increasing the proportion supplied of nondispatchable energy – the considered “green” forms primarily wind and solar power – as part of an overall portfolio of energy provision. Permanent spikes upwards in average pricing along with man-made crises of late demonstrate the problem, both economic and political, of state-sponsored favoring of less reliable, if not more expensive, renewable energy forms.

Fortunately, the federal government appears to be exiting that inferior policy option, but some states in their policy agendas continue to cling to the mythical, evidence-free view that fossil fuels cause significantly negative climate change. This religious faith often manifests in official renewable portfolio standards, where about half have some mandatory standard to be met sometime in the future (some as early as five years from now) specifying the proportion of renewable energy sources behind powering that state’s homes and businesses.

Memorial Day, 2025

This column publishes every Sunday through Thursday around noon U.S. Central Time (maybe even after sundown on busy days, or maybe before noon if things work out, or even sometimes on the weekend if there's big news) except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Christmas, or New Year's Day when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, in addition to these are also Easter Sunday, Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Monday, May 26 being Memorial Day, I invite you to explore this link.