Scott Walker\'s latest ad, like his previous campaign ads, is full of lies. Actually, just one big lie.
This one is about his alleged efforts to protect Medicaid. His eyes aren\'t tracking properly but he assures some (allegedly) typical older Wisconsin voters that he\'s looking out for them by claiming that he\'s added more money to Medicaid than ever before$1.2 billion.
OK, fair enough. He did add $1.2 billion to Medicaid.
But according to his own calculations at the time he proposed his budget, Medicaid needed $1.8 billion more to continue at the same level as before.
That\'s a whopping $600 million short.
Some protector.
And how did Walker propose filling that gap?
By handing his Medicaid-hating Secretary of Health Services Dennis Smith almost carte blanche to come up with $600 million in “savings.”
No public hearings, no debate, no legislative oversight. It may not have even been constitutional.
The Legislature didn\'t give Smith all of the autonomy Walker had requested. But they gave him a ton.
So Smith and Walker decided to cut down BadgerCare by raising premiums, pushing low-income folks into the greedy arms of the private insurance industry or to go without, and force more than 60,000 people from the program, including 29,000 kids.
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The problem, of course, is that they needed the Obama administration\'s permission to do so. And to get it, they had to prove that Wisconsin would have a budget deficit in 2013, the end of Walker\'s first budget.
The federal government only gave Walker and Smith permission to make about a quarter of their requested changes. Still, that would force 17,000 individuals to leave BadgerCare.
And it also points up another lie: Walker didn\'t balance the budget. Because if he had balanced the budget, he wouldn\'t need to kick folks off of BadgerCare.
So, another Walker campaign ad, another Walker campaign lie.