Will Ideology Trump People In Harrisburg?

Tom Corbett was inaugurated last week as Governor of Pennsylvania. To be fair to him, I did not believe he had been in office long enough to do anything bad yet. Then I got an email. Here's the text:

Join the fight for affordable health care

More than 40,000 working Pennsylvanians who now have access to health care through adultBasic health insurance will soon be without health-care coverage...unless Gov. Tom Corbett acts.

adultBasic provides bare-bones health insurance to uninsured working adults. The state's tax-exempt Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurers have helped to fund the program over the past six years under an agreement that fulfills their charitable obligations as tax-exempt insurers. These Blues' insurers also have a surplus of $5.6 billion.

The agreement with the Blues expired Dec. 31, and the fund is expected to run out of money at the end of February. If the Blues continued to fund the program it would cost $150 million, or 2.6 percent of their surplus, and working people could continue to afford to go to the doctor.

Gov. Corbett has said he will let the program expire rather than renegotiate.

House Democrats are calling on Gov. Corbett to renegotiate with Pennsylvania's Blue Cross and Blue Shield providers and are asking the governor to sit down with lawmakers and discuss other viable funding options. We must continue to fight to ensure affordable health care for all Pennsylvanians.

Please join us in this fight. Sign the petition to save adultBasic!

Let's be clear about a few things here. Politically no one can force Governor Corbett's hand here. He has majorities in both houses of the legislature, and easily. The people in the adultBasic program are people who really need help, and the help they get here is exactly what the name says- basic. It means they get to see a doctor. The Blues fund this program under an obligation they have anyway, so this isn't a "trouble" to them, it's part of their mission. So why not do this? Why not help these people? There's really no reason, except for ideology. It's a shame when ideology trumps humans.