"Georgians pay high price for stubborn leaders"

Jay Bookman, in his AJC column on Jan 20th said that we Georgians are paying a high price for our stubborn leaders in government.    He was referring to the continued refusal by the legislature and by Gov. Nathan Deal to accept the federal government's help in expanding Medicaid health coverage .

In his State of the State message, Gov. Deal repeated his reasons, saying that it would have added $209 million to this year's budget alone to cover the state's part.   That sounds like a lot of money -- but, it's not in relative terms.   As Bookman explains, $209 million is only 0.88% of the $23.5 Billion budget for 2017.   And it would leverage billions of federal dollars coming to the state, which would create thousands of jobs, help keep rural hospitals open, and improve the health and lives of hundreds of thousands of our citizens.

Other Republican governors who joined Deal in resisting it at first have come around to accepting federal dollars.   Why are our leaders so stubborn?    As Bookman says:

"[T]his is not a case of 'can’t'; it is a case of 'won’t.'   It is a case of Georgia’s leadership feeling trapped into a bad decision by their own rhetoric. It’s bad politics getting in the way of good governance."

And I suspect that even some Republicans regret it, although I'm not sure Gov. Deal would be one of them.   He seems to have a lot of empathy for prisoners, leading some pretty good prison reforms, including a bold plan to help prepare them for taking charge of their lives after release.    Why does he not have the same empathy for the 'working poor,' who would be the target group this would help?


Can the answer lie anywhere else other than the Republicans' stubborn refusal to accept anything that represents a success for President Obama?   I'm open to suggestions.   It's got to be something other than Deal's given explanation that we can't afford it.   Simple math shows the lie in that.

Ralph