Galloway says Parson playing politics with timing of Missouri Medicaid ballot measure
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has not yet announced whether he will shift a proposed constitutional amendment expanding Medicaid eligibility from the November to the August ballot.
But his chief Democratic rival is already criticizing the expected move as purely political — an attempt to avoid defending his opposition to Medicaid expansion when he is a candidate on the fall ballot.
Today is the deadline for Parson to move the question to August.
Proponents gathered nearly 350,000 signatures for a proposed constitutional amendment expanding Medicaid coverage to thousands of low-income adults.
It was widely expected that the time it would take to verify those signatures meant the issue would appear on the November ballot alongside the president, governor and all but one statewide elected official.
But last week, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced he had employed a rarely-used technique to expedite the signature verification process. By using random sampling instead of sending signatures to local election authorities, Ashcroft bought Parson time to move the issue to the lower-turnout August primary ballot.
Ashcroft said he used random sampling in order to avoid burdening local election authorities so close to a municipal election, which was moved from April to June 2 because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
State Auditor Nicole Galloway, the leading Democrat seeking to unseat Parson this November, believes the real motivation was to take Medicaid expansion off the table as an issue in the fall campaign.
“He knows that Medicaid expansion is more popular than he is in a general election, so he hopes that a smaller electorate will give him a better chance of misleading the voters and defeating it,” said Chris Sloan, Galloway’s campaign manager. “Gov. Parson is on the wrong side of the issues voters care about. He has to play political games with the democratic process to protect his own political prospects.”
Neither the governor’s office nor Parson’s campaign could be immediately reached for comment.
Galloway has been steadfast in her support of Medicaid expansion, which if approved by voters is estimated could extend health care coverage to 230,000 additional low-income adults.
Missouri’s Medicaid program does not cover most adults without children. The income eligibility threshold for adults with children is about one-fifth of the poverty level, one of the lowest cutoffs nationally. Eligibility thresholds are higher for children, seniors and the disabled.
While Parson has said he would have no choice but to implement Medicaid expansion should it become law, he has pledged to oppose it. He has argued expanding Medicaid eligibility would mean taking money away from education, workforce development, and roads and bridges.
Proponents counter with studies showing that expanding Medicaid would not only provide health care to low-income Missourians, but it could also save the state money in the long run by drawing additional federal funding to cover a variety of health services currently funded by state revenue.
Moving the Medicaid expansion question to the August ballot would echo what Republicans did in 2018 when faced with a campaign by labor unions to repeal the state’s right-to-work law.
In 2018, after labor unions rallied to gather enough signatures to place a question on the November ballot seeking to repeal right-to-work, GOP lawmakers fast-tracked a bill moving it to August.
The move was seen as an effort to protect Republican candidates that November from an expected onslaught of union campaign spending and voter outreach.
In the end, labor unions spent more than $15 million to defeat right-to-work and rallied supporters across the state. They prevailed, as voters rejected the GOP-backed law by a wide margin.
As of April 15, the political action committee supporting the Medicaid ballot measure reported having more than $400,000 cash on hand. And it has shown it can raise cash in a hurry, such as when last September it received $1.3 million in donations from two healthcare organizations in one day.
