Just restating what has been stated many times already this weekend, but Medicaid will be expanded in Louisiana sometime in the first quarter of 2016.
Edwards, a state lawmaker, will take over the office from term-limited Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal in January. Edwards has supported Medicaid expansion in Louisiana, which Jindal has rejected.
Details are still needed to develop an actual timeline for implementation. Governor Elect Edwards (D-LA) has said that he will expand Medicaid by executive order on the first day that he is in office. However Louisiana has a budget crisis as it is a petro-state and oil prices have crashed. The Louisiana legislature is still dominated by conservative Republicans and although they effectively washed their hands of Medicaid expansion by authorizing the governor to make the call, Medicaid expansion could be part of a series of negoatiations to resolve the budget crisis. Straight up expansion would take a month or two to get the plumbing right while a 1115 waiver expansion would take longer. I bet it will initially be straight up expansion with a March 1 enrollment start date to allow the managed care companies sufficient time to reconfigure their systems.
Patricia Kayden
Hooray!! I’ve heard that Edwards is a conservative Democrat, but at least he’s doing one thing right.
Baud
He needs to do it and then negotiate if necessary. It’s free money, and he just won after campaigning on this. The other side has no cards.
JPL
Elections matter.
Baud
@JPL:
Amen.
BGinCHI
Dear Kentucky,
Please put your Obamacare in the enclosed package and affix the proper postage.
Thanks and good luck not dying.
Love,
Louisiana
MomSense
@JPL:
Yup.
Chris
Why I want to punch every asshole who tells me it doesn’t really matter who they vote for.
Wordpress Developers
Folks,
The site is back up, and it wasn’t us – the host upgraded the server back-end last night and didn’t test to see if the site came back up. I didn’t realize until this morning, and before I could diagnose, Mistermix had already submitted a trouble ticket. I am now going to put on the flame-retardant gear and review John’s post from late last week asking about issues.
Some things to report – for Frontpagers, as well as Commentors and Readers:
1) We have done nothing to futz with RSS over the past week or so, and for some or all RSS users, the site has been inconsistently updated with fresh content. I expect that this server upgrade will iron out those issues. If not, please report them via email to me.
2) FYWP – eaten posts or comments. This shouldn’t happen, although sometimes it might when there’s a lot of server load. The upgrade should have enhanced multi-threading support, so we should see much less of this. So, for those that have had issues previously with either comments or posts that disappear into the aethyr, please let me know if things still disappear. Or if they seem better, positive reports are also welcome!
3) Site not refreshing for the text version on mobile or tablet devices. This should also be fixed now; when you go to the site, you should always see today’s most recent post. Over the past few weeks, some readers were seeing day-old content as the most recent stuff. This seems to have mostly affected iOS devices. Before reporting a problem, please try this step to clear out the cache on your iPhone or iPad: Close all tabs in Safari that have Balloon Juice open, then go to your Home screen, and double-click the Home button and swipe to close Safari completely. Now, restart Safari and go to the site. From that point on, you should always see the most recent content (you can check by turning off the Mobile theme via a link at the bottom of the page)
4) Accessibility for those using AT tech: through the kind efforts of a reader, I have a few things that I need to do to the site to make things better for your devices. I will be working on that as well.
5) General site usability – the site should be a bit peppier, and we’ll try to nail down any issues slowing down page loading. In my testing and development, I do not use any ad blocking or other type of filtering technology, so I should see a “worst case scenario” view of the page load. Such things as the Twitter feed and Google Analytics do slow down the page load a bit. We are working on fine tuning the caching and CDN setup to make things as zippy as possible.
6) Comments – Late last week, I briefly turned on a potential comment engine and folks hated it, especially Amir. Sorry for the confusion, but please let this serve as a warning – it may go back on temporarily in a few days for some limited testing. I’ll try to do it mid-day so hopefully less upsetting for many of the night/early morning crew. This is just to test it; the formatting is good enough for testing, even if it doesn’t have comment numbers, etc. There is no point wasting time on the formatting if I’m trying to see if the bloody thing works as it’s supposed to, and to see what kind of increase or decrease in server load it makes. It will be up for an hour or two, max, then I will disable it and return to this comment system. If it works well, we might just go with it instead of waiting for mid December when the alternate commenting plugin will have the functionality this site needs.
I’m going to post this comment in each new thread to day to maximize the number of readers it reaches.
Best,
Alain
[email protected]
Amir Khalid
@WordPress Developers:
Isn’t there a better way to do that, like the sticky post Betty Cracker suggested?
Yutsano
There have been rumours that this might start a domino effect in the South where Medicaid starts getting expanded in the rest of the states as Louisiana gets better. It’s definitely a wait and see for me. But it’s a huge net positive. Plus it also shows how a Democrat can win in the South.
RaflW
“Edwards, a state lawmaker, will take over the office from term-limited Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal”
Term-limited and deeply unpopular Gov. Jindal, that is.
Just had to do a little dance on Jindal’s total collapse as a politician. I’m sure he will have plenty of RW grift to keep him housed and fed after he leaves office, so I feel less than zero pity for him.
scav
And here’s how some in Brussels handled a real event: meow.
As for notices — meaningless prattle contribution alert! — I’m all for low-tech don’t risk breaking anything solutions that leave time and brain-power cycles for actual issues.
rikyrah
SO Happy for the 225,000 citizens of Louisiana who will now get access to healthcare. Someone’s life will be saved.
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
And a sticky post with comments would let people see whether their problem had already been reported, what fix might be available, etc.