Scott Walker Doesn't Care About Wisconsin Kids

So much mayhem has resulted from Governor Scott Walker's recent announcement that he plans to tackle the state of Wisconsin's financial woes on the backs of its workers that few people have noticed the other cost-saving, blood-letting measures he is proposing. In a proposal designed to give Walker essentially unlimited power to dismantle the state's Medicaid programs, our new governor has decided that he and his Department of Health Services should be able to make whatever changes to those programs they see fit without having to go through the messy steps of having those changes approved by the Wisconsin legislature. Instead, he wants to have any and all changes rubber-stamped by the Legislature's budget committee alone, and with an all Republican, super conservative budget committee, that should not be an impediment to Walker's whims.

Once this proposal has been approved - and it will be this week - the fate of Wisconsin's medical assistance programs will be in the hands of Dennis Smith, Walker's newly appointed secretary of Health Services. If the name doesn't ring a bell, or strike fear in the hearts of Wisconsinites, it should. Smith has been a vocal advocate of states simply opting out of Medicaid altogether. He testified last month before Congress in opposition to the health care reform act passed last year. And in perhaps the most damning example of his lack of insight or reason, in 2007 he contributed $250 to Tommy Thompson's campaign for President. In his recent role as a regular contributer to the uber-conservative "think tank" (and I put it in quotes because I am often convinced that very little thought goes into their diatribes) The Heritage Foundation, he has talked with paranoia about the unlikely scenario of taxpayer funds being used to fund abortions through Medicaid, and imagined a "radical social agenda" in the economic stimulus package.

I think it is safe to assume that under Smith, and with Walker's approval, Wisconsin's Medicaid programs are toast. Those programs, that go by the names BadgerCare, BadgerCare Plus, SeniorCare, and FamilyCare, provide health care for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites. BadgerCare alone had 459,007 children enrolled as of January 2011. It allowed 18,629 pregnant women to obtain prenatal care in January, and was providing health insurance coverage for 253,317 adults as well. In addition to providing what many people consider a necessity, BadgerCare also saves money that would be spent on uninsured people who require emergency medical care. A study in 2006 showed that BadgerCare had saved $283 million over six years in uncompensated care costs that Wisconsin hospitals would have eaten - and then passed along to all of us.

Medicaid has its flaws, as does any other insurance plan, private or government funded. But if there are approximately 1,400,000 children under age 18 in the state of Wisconsin, and 459,007 of them receive health care under the state's Medicaid insurance plan, then cutting Medicaid funding out of the state budget will mean that one third of our children in this state will have no health insurance. That means no coverage of immunizations, no well child care, no interventions for health concerns, no urgent or emergent coverage, no developmental assessments, nothing.

Financial concerns are serious, but depriving a third of our children access to basic and necessary health care is unconscionable.

Niall Ferguson, Political Analyst for the 19th Century

Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor of history and business, has just published an article critical of President Obama's handling of the populist uprising in Egypt. He even goes so far as to call Obama's hesitant and admittedly uncertain actions of the past two weeks a "foreign policy debacle." After noting with pride that he jetted last week to attend the annual Herzliya security conference in Tel Aviv, he informs us that the consensus of the assembled experts on the Middle East was "a colossal failure of American foreign policy."

However, I actually cannot find any such condemnation in any of the actual reports, summaries, bulletins, or statements from the Herzliya conference. While there is criticism of Obama concerning the year wasted in trying to pressure Iran about nuclear weapons, there is no mention of Obama's handling of the Egyptian crisis. Other reports make no mention of the US at all. While the topic of Egypt clearly dominated the conference, the US response did not seem to be a significant concern. Israel blasted Obama's response to the situation in Egypt in the first few days of the uprising, but has been fairly quiet since.

It is also fascinating that Ferguson seems to believe that the Obama administration should have predicted the uprising, had a more cohesive policy immediately in place, and acted decisively throughout the events when neither Israel or Saudi Arabia, who border Egypt and by any criteria have far more at stake in Egypt's future, seemed to have had any idea that a revolt was possible.  In fact, some argue that Israel seems remarkably unprepared for what has been happening. The Saudis have yet to actually respond to the entire sequence of events, and now that Mubarak is gone, are giving the impression of paralysis in the face of fear and uncertainty. I do not see how Obama and the US could possibly have been more informed and proactive than Egypt's own neighbors.

Perhaps part of Ferguson's disconnect with current world events and the foreign policy choices being made to respond to them comes from his admiration of a nineteenth century Prime Minister of a country that no longer exists. Otto von Bismarck, Ferguson's diplomacy hero, was a brilliant statesman who, as the Prime Minister of Prussia, was responsible for the unification of Germany. He is famously remembered for his observation that "the statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all" - which Ferguson quotes at the beginning of his article.

While this held true over 100 years ago, and still carries some weight today, frankly, times have changed over the past century. Communications across the world are no longer transmitted by ships and ponies. Bismarck cannot possibly have conceived of the internet, in which events are transmitted almost in real time around the world, and millions of people can be reached in a matter of seconds. The revolutions in the mid nineteenth century that culminated in the unification of Germany lasted two years, not two weeks. The rapid unfolding of events in Egypt, and their near instantaneous transmission to the rest of the world, meant that a cautious approach was probably the wisest path. It also means that the US, just like Israel and Saudi Arabia, needs some time to sort out the events and evaluate their ramifications. Egypt did not need our interference in recent weeks, and we could not have known what would be helpful and what would have been harmful. Israel and Saudi Arabia clearly believed the same course of non-intervention was the wisest.

To his credit, I am sure that Ferguson is an excellent historian regarding his area of expertise, which happens to be the first three decades of the last century. I am not certain, however, how much of an expert that makes him given the technological and social media revolutions that have taken place in the past decade alone. This article certainly does not indicate that he has learned much about contemporary foreign affairs or policy in the age of the internet.