Are you kidding Me? Representative Ethan Orr has spent the past few days telling republicans that they can’t let the Medicaid Expansion debate tear apart the Republican Party. As an Independent myself, I would like to tell Representative Orr that he needs to stop tearing apart the state much less his registered Party.
Most Independents and Republicans oppose expansion. We really don’t’ want you to expand anything that it so broken. We would like to see you work on tort reform and those other things that would shrink medical costs before you even think about expanding the number of people paying $10 for an aspirin.
There I go again losing focus, which is what Representative Orr would hope might happen.
Mr. Orr, it is disingenuous and insulting of you to talk about party unity when it looks as if it is only a handful of Republicans who support expansion. The rest of the Party seems pretty unified. It looks, to an outsider, that maybe what you are really saying is, “I am going to take care of the crony capitalists just this one time and as soon as I am done, you need to forgive me.”
It also seems that you keep hiding behind the poor and the mentally ill folks who have no kids. Let’s face it, if you really cared about those people all that much you would be doing one of two things.
You would become a democrat, or you would be looking for ways for all people, including the working stiffs, to have a chance to afford healthcare. That requires two things; lower healthcare costs, and get out of the way of small business owners who make jobs so people can afford private healthcare.
But you aren’t talking about those things except in vague generalities. Just like the vague generalities you use when you talk about being a pro-life guy. For us Independents, the whole pro-life anti-abortion discussion is the stupid game Republicans and Democrats play to generate donations. Move on, if you want to be taken seriously by us.
We, the Independents of the State of Arizona want to pursue happiness. We don’t want to pad the seats of fat cats in Boardrooms and we don’t want to know what happens in someone’s bedroom.
We can’t pursue happiness as long as we are footing the bill for your Governor and her buddies to get rich, while the middle class continues to pay, while the poor get poorer.
It is possible that your party members will show you forgiveness; they are a dying breed and need to hang on to all the politicians they can, but independents will not forget or forgive the fact that you had seemed to be a moderate who was interested in looking for cost-effective solutions. Instead you bought into the largest explosion of this state’s long term budget in its history.
What part of your budget got expanded? I assume we will have to wait until your term is over to discover that little nugget.
William Johnson