To the Editor:
Mary Kimm’s editorial encouraging Virginia’s legislature to expand Medicaid coverage because the federal government will foot the $3 billion bill ignores how the feds will foot the bill — by deficit spending. Revenues won’t cover this additional spending — it will go straight on top of the deficit for future generations to foot.
The 30,000 jobs it will supposedly create — one for every 13 beneficiaries — is an egregious misdirection of resources. Of course business groups and chambers of commerce are for future taxpayers providing public benefits to their low-wage workers so they don’t have to. Business nowadays is so short-term, bottom-line focused it has little care about long-term fiscal consequences.
A billion dollars of “free federal funding” is a tempting bait. But so far, to their credit, Virginia’s legislature has mustered the courage to turn it down, as have many other state legislatures. Is that why, perhaps, the public holds its state legislatures in higher esteem than the Congress, whose public approval flirts with single digits?
Dino Drudi
Alexandria