Utah’s elected rulers were determined not just to ignore -- but to spite -- the will of the voters who last year passed the Medicaid-expanding Proposition 3.
So they passed Senate Bill 96, a measure to set aside the humane and fiscally responsible ballot initiative and replace it with a cruel and wasteful measure that would spend a lot more money to provide health care access to many fewer people.
Baked into SB96 was the assumption that the sitting federal administration, with its open contempt for law in general and the Affordable Care Act in particular, would put partisan interests and studied meanness ahead of the law and humanity to grant Utah the waivers it would need to run its cruel joke of a Medicaid program.