When I first was an elected Budget Committee, I was aghast at how much money we spent on ” XXXXX Association of YYY” – each department seemed to belong to two or more associations based on the different levels of government (e.g., NH Association of Fire Chiefs, New England Association of Librarians, American Association of Town Clerks, International Association of Police Chiefs). It wouldn’t be just ONE Association, but if they belonged to one, they belonged to what seemed to be every level of a possible association. To boot, each department head also seemed to have their Association dues paid for as well.
In toto, it was not a small amount of money. Near the end of my Vice-Chairmanship term, I started to ask a most important question:
If the town didn’t pay for it, based on the value you keep telling us, you’d pay for this out of your own pocket, right?
I probably asked that over 30 times over a few years (and they were always incensed when I did). Only once did I get an affirmative answer – it was only worth it to these folks if someone else was paying the freight. Yes, that’s right – “free money” to them. Another example is our “sidewalk to nowhere” – with a whole lot of decades to have made the decision to have paid for it ourselves if it had been that important, it was never built. Well, not until $300,000 of YOUR Federal tax monies came to my town. Once again, the moral is that unless someone else was paying for it, it just wasn’t near the real priority list. So let me ask the same question of our NH House and Senate elected officials:
If expanding Medicaid was all that darn important, why didn’t you do it long ago with just NH money?
It was important enough to call a Special Session, right? We had lots of jawboning for it, yes? We had a lot of the folks that would benefit from expanding it telling their stories to pull at heart strings (while most of us taxpayers have to work), eh?
NH has quite a bit of our its own money- why didn’t you decide that it was important enough? Important enough for a Special Session. But that was to spend SOMEONE ELSE’S money – not your own NH money. That’s tells us lots, doesn’t it?
This shows that Medicaid Expansion wasn’t the priority you all said it was all along, was it? When it came time to rejigger priorities within the existing budget, based on the the rhetoric I heard and read about getting people covered, you decided it wasn’t worth it. You refused to do it – mostly because you knew NH taxpayers wouldn’t pay the extra taxes and you didn’t have the political courage to cut “lesser” priorities to spend on this “high priority” items (“Lives are at stake!”). This only happened when Obamacare waggled multiple fist full of dollars in front of your noses – otherwise you would NEVER have tried it!
So what is the real takeaway? The importance is not about the poor. The importance isn’t about helping. The political priority that you have shown us is that the only importance is acquiring other peoples’ money so that you look blameless to NH taxpayers. Same old shell game from the taxpayer’s view point.
