Eye on Albany: Risky Scheme To Game Medicaid
The new state budget “imposes a multibillion-dollar tax on health insurance without specifying who must pay how much,” fumes the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. The health commissioner must negotiate basic details of this “tax on managed care organizations” with the feds. The MCO tax is similar to a California one “that generates more than $4 billion a year by gaming Medicaid’s financing system,” where the state and feds share costs. In effect, Cali “is taxing the federal government” by exploiting a loophole; Albany’s trying to join in “before it goes away.” But once the loophole closes, the state may be “tempted to reconfigure the MCO tax” to apply to “the entire health insurance industry.” And the health commissioner may have the authority “to make that billion-dollar change without further action by the Legislature.”
Foreign desk: Yes, US Troops Can Save Haiti
“Should Americans care about Haiti? Could we help? Can we get out soon?” asks Rick Barton at The Hill, answering with a triple “yes.” “Human suffering is a driving concern for most Americans,” and the current anarchy features “massive and brutal violence” from gangs while “the victims of rape are too many for the United Nations to count.” Washington has the “unique capacity to make a positive difference” by restoring “freedom of movement [in] airports and harbors” to let humanitarian aid go in, as well as disrupting “gang dominance” to ensure public safety. Deploying “300-500 US special forces for three to five months will convince the Haitian people and most gangs that there will be a rebalancing of power in favor of the citizenry”; that limited mission can “give Haitians the opportunity to start anew.”
Campus watch: Online Class = Pedagogy Theater
“By moving its coursework online” amid pro-Palestinian rallies, observes Ian Bogost at The Atlantic, Columbia can claim it’s “still delivering its core service” — education. “Yet if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that ‘moving classes online’ isn’t really possible.” Class isn’t just a place for students to receive information; it creates “camaraderie” and offers “opportunities for discourse, flirtation, boredom, and all the other trappings of collegiate fulfillment.” Online classes are “pedagogy theater.” Fine: The “ubiquity of Zoom” etc. has “made it easy” to go remote “for any reason.” But under “normal circumstances,” virtual learning is discouraged. This only makes sense if the schools’ goal “is to control the stories they tell about themselves.”
TikTok beat: Biden-Harris vs. National Security
“President Biden’s stance on TikTok is incoherent,” smirks National Review’s Jim Geraghty: He just signed into law a bill forcing “TikTok’s Chinese owner to either sell within 270 days or have the app blocked in the American market,” then his “reelection campaign announced that it would keep its TikTok account active” through November. The Biden-Harris campaign “is trying to gaslight us into believing that it’s perfectly normal” for the prez “to continue using an app that has been labeled a threat by every major figure in his own administration.” Yes: The “same app that is banned from all government phones… is on the phones used by the president’s campaign staff.” Plainly, “Certain people have no fixed beliefs or principles.”
Conservative: The Cash Behind Campus Protests
“Two of America’s largest philanthropic foundations are behind a group that has paid some of the anti-Israel activists for the kind of antics disrupting campuses across the country,” warns Ira Stoll at The Wall Street Journal. “The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights” offers “stipends of $2,880 to $3,360” for work that “could include aiding campaigns that ‘demand federal or state politicians cut US military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.’ ” “The corporate entity behind these fellowships is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East,” which has received hundreds of thousands in funding from “George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundation” and “The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
