Back in early January, Paul Goldman and I wrote in the Washington Post that it was foolish to bet against something happening on Medicaid expansion this year:
McAuliffe’s team understands the Medicaid stakes: There is no second chance for a first impression. The legislative showdown can make or break his image. There is no legal requirement to resolve every issue this year. Genuine progress will suffice. Howell and Saslaw are savvy dance partners.
Now, a month later, the RTD’s Jeff Schapiro follows in our wake with the rumblings he hears on expansion:
Repackaging is an alternative. There are numerous signs it is underway; that what looks like Medicaid expansion, what sounds like Medicaid expansion and what works like Medicaid expansion will be called something else.
Maybe it’s a state-run health insurance exchange. Perhaps it’s a public-private partnership. Regardless of the particulars, ideas are being floated and votes recorded…and in the Senate, there are at least two Republicans (John Watkins and Emmett Hanger) who are looking to make a deal.
The political lines behind a deal are clear: the Governor and the Senate, with the backing of the business community, will push for something. The House, for now, is making as many loud noises as it can that nothing will happen.
It all sounds very familiar.
Let’s add another ingredient: the state budget. It’s easy to forget in what seems like a session about nothing that Virginia’s biennial budget has to be pieced together this year. The House and Senate will present competing versions and the whole affair will end up in a conference. The conference will haggle behind closed doors and produce a compromise that will land on legislators’ desks moments before the roll is called.
Along the way there will be opportunities to make a deal. It doesn’t have to be full expansion, or even anything that has the word “Medicaid” attached to it. Some sort of compromise will be reached that allows everyone to claim victory.
That’s how this stuff generally works. If it doesn’t, then we end up in over time. More haggling. More posturing. And certainly more sharp words. With the state budget clock ticking, everyone knows — unless they want to be tagged as the party that shut down Virginia government — some sort of deal will be reached.
It will infuriate purists on both sides because, more likely than not, it will be a deal to buy time. Perhaps just enough to reset the political lines in 2015.
