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Credit: McClatchy

As the debate over health care reform heated up in the fall of 2009, Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander called Medicaid "a medical ghetto" that "none of us, or any of our families, would ever want to be a part of for our health care." As it turns out, Alexander and his GOP colleagues were as wrong as they were cynical. A breakthrough study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reveals that Medicaid recipients have far greater access to doctors, live healthier lives and enjoy more financial stability than those who must go without. Nevertheless, 98% of Congressional Republicans voted to gut Medicaid spending by over $1 trillion in the next decade and with it, add up to 44 million people to the ranks of the uninsured.

Currently, the $300 billion Medicaid program serves roughly 60 million Americans. On average, the federal government picks up 57% of the tab, with poorer states like Mississippi and Alabama getting 75% of the funding from Washington. Medicaid not only pays for a third of nursing home care in the United States; it covers a third of all childbirths. (In Texas, the figure is one-half.) As with Medicare, Medicaid provides insurance for substantially less than private insurers (27% less for children, 20% for adults.) Still, the likes of Senator Alexander and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) suggested that it is better to be uninsured than on Medicaid.

Not according to the NBER. The same nonpartisan group that determines the official beginning and end of recessions, NBER found, as Harvard researcher and former member of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers Katherine Baicker put it, "Medicaid matters."

The NBER study avoided the pitfalls of past studies by examining the case of Oregon. After Oregon in 2008 established a lottery to add 10,000 people to it limited Medicaid rolls, the NBER team interview 6,000 of the lucky ones and 6,000 of the 90,000 who lost out. The results were striking:

We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.

The New York Times provided some of the details of the Medicaid success story:

Those with Medicaid were 35 percent more likely to go to a clinic or see a doctor, 15 percent more likely to use prescription drugs and 30 percent more likely to be admitted to a hospital. Researchers were unable to detect a change in emergency room use.

Women with insurance were 60 percent more likely to have mammograms, and those with insurance were 20 percent more likely to have their cholesterol checked. They were 70 percent more likely to have a particular clinic or office for medical care and 55 percent more likely to have a doctor whom they usually saw.

The insured also felt better: the likelihood that they said their health was good or excellent increased by 25 percent, and they were 40 percent less likely to say that their health had worsened in the past year than those without insurance.

As Ezra Klein of the Washington Post summed up the findings, "knowing that Medicaid matters is good, but we already sort of knew that." But back in Washington, in response to that self-evident truth, Democrats and Republicans have drawn contradictory lessons and offered diametrically opposed plans for the future.

By extending Medicaid coverage to families earning up to 133% of the poverty level, starting in 2014 the Affordable Care Act passed by Democrats in Congress will bring insurance to millions more Americans. A March study by the Commonwealth Fund revealed that revealed that when fully implemented, the ACA will bring relief to "nearly all of the 52 million working-age adults who were without health insurance for a time in 2010."

Not if the Republicans get their way.

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At the end of July, Blue America and our pals at the Americans For America PAC launched the first in a series of videos that highlights what kind of people now lead the Republican Party. We featured Sarah Palin, Rand Paul and John Boehner. And we asked the readers here at C&L, at DWT and at Digby's Hullabaloo to tell us who to do the next ad for. Lots of votes for Ken Calvert and Michele Bachmann but it was that reactionary harridan from North Carolina, Virginia Foxx, who got the most votes.

As you can see in the ad above, there are a lot of things that the voters in western North Carolina need to think about when they consider returning Virginia Foxx for another term in Congress. But there's also an outstanding alternative. Populist champion Billy Kennedy would make a far better Representative for ordinary working families, a part of the population Foxx is dismissive of. Foxx already has $1,270,733 on hand. Her biggest donors are the sugar lobby, banks, the Medical Industrial Compex, alcoholic beverage companies, gambling interests and foreign powers with their own agendas. Meanwhile, Billy Kennedy has $70,406 on hand. He addressed the problem on the cascade of corrupt corporate cash flooding into congressional campaigns:

"The case of Citizens United v FEC was heard by the Supreme Court back in January. When all was said and done, the Court ended up changing the law so that corporations can now spend as much as they like on political campaigns without even identifying themselves. That’s right-- average working people get the short end of the stick. Again.

So the US House has now just passed the “Disclose Act,” a law which will at least require that these corporations tell us who they are when they put their fancy, high-dollar commercials on TV that attack anyone who would dare come up against them. The “Disclose Act” could most certainly be better than it is. If we didn’t have so many politicians in Washington beholden to corporate interests, we’d surely have gotten a better bill in the end, but the bill is at least a start.

Even so, I wasn’t surprised to hear Rep. Virginia Foxx rail against the “Disclose Act” on WPTF radio Thursday. I wasn’t surprised because Rep. Foxx’s record is pretty clear on this kind of thing. Her take is that working people need to get in line and work longer hours for less money and be thankful they’ve got any job at all. Corporations and rich people, on the other hand, deserve better because they’re the ones providing jobs for longer hours and less money. It sounds like code for "we can't do it because it's too complicated."

It’s worth noting that Rep. Foxx never said a word on any radio stations when the Supreme Court made sure individual Americans’ rights came up short against corporate rights. She wasn’t on talk radio, outraged, when Americans woke up one morning to find out they’d been sold out by corporate interests again. Not at all. The only thing on this whole issue that got Rep. Foxx in a tizzy and made her want to “sit down and cry” (as she said on the radio) was that someone in Washington was actually trying to do something about it. Rep. Foxx didn’t show up at any radio stations the morning after corporations stole the peoples’ power in the dead of night. But she showed up pretty quick to be outraged when some brave folks in Washington tried to reclaim it.

Rep. Foxx has been in Washington too long. She’s forgotten what she’s supposed to be doing up there, and she will say anything to be re-elected. It’s time to send her home."

If you'd like to help us put the ad on TV in the Piedmont and the suburbs of Winston-Salem, just click on Foxx's face-- and no, that photo is not photoshopped.

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Glenn Beck must have been feeling the pressure from Virginia Foxx yesterday in the Absurd Wingnuttery Championships. So, after Foxx compared the liberal health-care reform package working its way through Congress to terrorism, Beck went on his Fox News show and compared the package to the 9/11 attacks:

Beck: On 9/11, we experienced a feeling we had never had before -- when the buildings and our markets and the economy came falling down around our ears, we realized -- 'Oh my gosh. Our country isn't unsinkable.'

We came, on that day, to the understanding that this Republic is fragile. Here we are now, a decade later. I'm on the air again, warning you that our government cannot sustain our massive spending. The system will collapse if we continue down this progressive path.

Ten years ago, I could have shouted every single day about Osama bin Laden and his wacky, crazy threats to kill Americans in New York. And no one would have been willing to stand in line two hours while some security officers made grandma take her shoes off. No one would have done it.

But don't you see -- while the government is still not willing to do these things, today, America is different. America has changed. Washington, we're not going to let you get away with it anymore.

Look, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Conservatives are awake. 912ers are willing to do the hard things. We know what this means. We're taking time out of our busy lives, taking time away from their families, they're attending town-hall meetings -- you think they wanna do that? They are calling their representatives -- how many times do we have to be yelled at by your people in Washington? to work against the enactment of health care reform.

They are reading 2,000-page health-care bills on the weekend. They 912ers are willing to stand in line and take our shoes off before the plane actually hits the tower.

Glenn Beck has a long history of exploiting the 9/11 tragedy for the sake of ratings and rantings. (Who could forget his encomium to the widows? "It took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families.")

Indeed, you could make the case that his current stellar rise was built on such exploitation. Beck was a nobody until he started making incendiary remarks about Muslims on air and attacking liberals for their insufficient patriotism after 9/11 and cheerleading the Iraq invasion as a post-9/11 necessity. It's what made him famous in the first place.

And now he's springboarding from that to leading an open revolt against the liberal policies Americans just voted to implement, throwing a tantrum because no one believes in disproven and discredited conservative dogma anymore. No one, that is, except Glenn Beck and his hapless followers.

Okay, maybe requiring minimum IQs as a standard to run for national office is a bit harsh, but can we at least insist that politicians prove that they are actually human and not some mindless automaton programmed with talking points?

(In the past,) Foxx has claimed Democratic reforms would mean seniors are “put to death by their government,” that health reform is a “distraction,” and that “there are no Americans who don’t have health care.” She was at it again today on the House floor, arguing that health reform is a greater threat to our country than “any terrorist right now in any country”:

Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

Normally, this is where my head makes a very loud thunk against my desk at the stupidity, but instead I just find myself really angry at this illogical fear mongering and ugliness. But what can you expect from a politician ugly enough to call Matthew Shepard's murder "a hoax"?. Obviously her lip service towards valuing life doesn't really mean any living people.

Rep. Foxx, the lives of those 44,000 Americans who die needlessly every year because they do not have insurance is blood on your hands.

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First Rep. Virginia Foxx called Matthew Shepard's murder a 'hoax'. Then, she turned around and issued a non-apology apology:

I am especially sorry if his grieving family was offended by my statement. I was referring to a 2004 ABC News 20/20 report on Mr. Shepard's death. ABC's 20/20 report questioned the motivation of those responsible for his death. Referencing this media account may have been a mistake, but it was a mistake based on what I believed were reliable accounts.

But it wasn't a reliable account -- a fact that is obviously not well enough known, but still isn't any kind of excuse for uttering that kind of smear. And that's the problem. She spread a lie, a harmful, ugly lie, about Matt Shepard on the floor of the Congress, and she has never made plain to the public that it was a lie.

So you can't really blame Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, for declining to accept: "She's apologizing for semantics."

Yesterday she tried again, and failed just as miserably to actually own up to the problem:

“In the heat of trying to handle the rule on the floor, anybody can use a bad choice of words. Saying that the event was a hoax was a poor choice of words,” Foxx said. “I’ve apologized for that. I never meant in any way to harm the family or offend the family or anybody else for that matter.”

“The term ‘hoax’ was a poor choice of words used in the discussion of the hate-crimes bill,” Foxx said in a statement. “Mr. Shepard’s death was nothing less than a tragedy, and those responsible for his death certainly deserved the punishment they received.”

As David Badash at the New Civil Rights Movement acutely observes:

Foxx’s newest “apology” demonstrates her lack of understanding of the basic issue confronting her: She lied about why Matthew Shepard was killed, and maligned the memory of a 21 year-old college student who, to the world, has become the face of a hate crime victim.

... One non-apology is bad, two demonstrates not only a lack of remorse or decency, but a total lack of understanding of the important and sensitive issues that confront our country.

You see, that ABC News report, by Elizabeth Vargas, was debunked at the time as a journalistic atrocity:

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The lies that are told by right wing extremists know NO bounds. What Rep. Virginia Foxx said on the floor yesterday in attacking the hate-crimes bill was inexcusable. I will try to take some action against her.

From Media Matters Action Network:

Rep. Virginia Foxx Called Matthew Shepard Hate Crime "A Hoax"

Summary: On April 29, 2009, in a speech on the House floor, Rep. Virginia Foxx claimed that Matthew Shepard's death was merely the result of a robbery gone bad. While his killers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson did rob him, they also admitted that they were well aware of his sexual orientation and pretended they were gay to lure him away from the bar he was in at the time. The most striking feature of the case, of course, is that during the course of a normal, simple robbery, the victim is not generally beaten, tied to a post, and left for dead.

Matthew Shepard's Death Was A Hate Crime, Not Simply A Robbery

Rep. Foxx: "The bill was named after a very unfortunate incident that happened, where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of robbery. It wasn't because he was gay. The bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it's, it's really a hoax, that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills."[House Floor Speech, 4/29/09] All the evidence clearly indicates that this was a vicious hate crime, not a robbery gone bad...read on

America Blog says:

A hoax? Belittling the brutal murder of a 21-year-old college student? And Republicans wonder why their angry, hateful, pathetic party is now only 20% of the US population.

Dave N: I've written about the Shepard case a great deal, including in my book Death on the Fourth of July. Probably the chief source of misinformation about his murder was a 2004 ABC News report, which I debunked at the time:

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