Defending a move by majority Democrats in the Connecticut General Assembly to deal with prospective Medicaid cost increases, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven let the cat out of the bag.
“In his wrap-up speech,” the Hartford Courant tells us, “Senate
President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, said the Medicaid
funding was a ‘crisis’ that needed to be resolved in straightforward fashion.
‘We know there is a national problem in Medicaid that more and more people are relying
on Medicaid [emphasis mine],’ Looney said on the Senate floor. ‘They
often rely on Medicaid-paid aides if they are fortunate enough to live at home.
This is a current problem. … The federal impact is coming, and we will probably
have to deal with that in the fall.’”
More and more people are relying on Medicaid principally
because President Barack Obama
was successful in extending the reach of a Medicaid program that initially was
designed to cover catastrophic cases, mostly the indigent, seniors and the
disabled. Such groups relied on an unchanging base salary and were unable to
extend their own assets through additional job acquisitions. The Obama
extensions naturally increased Medicaid costs by adding more clients to the
program. The unwillingness of legislators to appropriate funds to pay for the
additional costs, everyone knew, would someday put the entire program in the
red.
This predictable “crisis” has been met by Looney and other Democrat
politicians in the highest taxed state in the nation by strumming the often played
strings of empathy: Medicaid recipients “fortunate enough to live at home…
often rely on Medicaid-paid aides” to survive in the modern era.
No one in Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation
has been asked whether escalating Medicaid costs might be reduced by returning
the program to its original mandated statutory borders? Fraudulent Medicaid
payments to able-bodied single workers should be eliminated.
To ask the question is to answer it. Politically, such a
solution would spell election death to any parsimonious politician who seeks to
solve deficit problems caused by the economically inappropriate and unaffordable
extension of vote grabbing programs. To do so would be election suicide.
Better to run up the red, eh?
Connecticut, we are to understand, need not in present
circumstances run up the red – the state’s current accumulative deficit is a
paralyzing $50 billion – because the General
Assembly responsible for that gargantuan debt has accepted the assurance of
Democrat Comptroller Sean Scanlon in a May 2025 advisory
letter that projects a “Fiscal Year 2025 General Fund surplus of $461.6 million
and a Special Transportation Fund surplus of $146.6 million.
The immediate problem – a shortfall in the state’s Medicaid
program of $284 million for the budget year that ends June 30 may be settled by
breaching Connecticut’s so called spending guardrails. Connecticut’s budget is
heavily reliant on millionaires and billionaires who pay a large chunk of state
expenditures. According to a February 2025 Hartford
Courant report, “the top 2.5% of tax filers paid 41% of the state
income tax in 2022. At the other end, the bottom 49% of filers — representing
essentially half of filers statewide — paid only 2.9% of the income tax.”
Wealthy taxpayers nationwide have been targeted by
neo-Marxist and Bernie Sanders socialists. Not a day goes by without some
greedy soak-the-rich leftist politician telling us that the rich must be made
to pay their “fair share” of taxes. Governor Ned Lamont has during his whole
term in office been pulling on the reins of the neo-progressive runaway horse
with little effect.
Now let’s see, a fourth grade math student might calculate,
if the state’s accumulative deficit is $50 billion and we may draw on a surplus
of $603 million to cover the current biennial deficit, we are left with a debt
of $ 49,397,000,000.
Like God, math will not be mocked. What surplus, math
proficient voters are likely to ask? The state’s “surplus,” they are beginning
to perceive, is little more than a false political tag used to convince voters
that those responsible for the fourth highest per capita debt in the nation
have been, as the 2026 elections near, unhorsed by a bold of lightening while
on the road to an economic Damascus? Finally, and at long last, the authors of
a $50 billion accumulative debt had seen the light. In fact, an enlightened
electorate now suspects, it is excessive spending that produces debt, and the
road out of debt is called – “Cut Spending.”
Connecticut’s “crisis,” Looney told his neo-progressive
comrades in the General Assembly, had prompted lawmakers “to break the state’s
spending cap in the current fiscal year that ends on June 30. But Lamont and
state Democrats said they broke through the cap only slightly. The spending
would be about $25 million over the cap, which Lamont described as about 0.1%
of the overall budget” according to the Courant.
The spending guardrails, Democrats are insisting, must be
broken to save the spending guardrails.
When Heather Somers, a Groton Republican who serves as the
ranking member on the budget-writing appropriations committee, protested, “It’s
really disappointing that we have a governor who has literally folded like a
lawn chair over this [guardrail maintenance],” Lamont replied, “I’m still
waiting to see the Senate Republicans’ budget proposal. It’s pretty easy
sitting on the sidelines, throwing hand grenades. You’re never going to govern
if you can’t come up a constructive solution of your own. I think we’ve come up
with a pretty constructive solution. We’re going to maintain our guardrails in
the next two fiscal years, and we’re going to do it without raising taxes. And
we’re going to make sure our budget is in balance.”
Here’s a constructive solution – cut spending.
Comments