Latest news with #LynnBonner
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
A sweeping child welfare and foster care bill wins NC Senate committee approval
Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Nash) discusses a child welfare bill (Photo: Lynn Bonner) An expansive bill overhauling the child welfare system that aims to increase stability for children in foster care won approval from a Senate committee on Thursday. House Bill 612 provides for increased oversight of local child welfare office decisions by the state Department of Health and Human Services. It sets out timeframes for court hearings on plans to move children in foster care to permanent homes. Courts would be allowed to authorize post-adoption contact agreements between biological and adoptive parents. Legislators have discussed comprehensive changes to child welfare and foster care laws for years. 'It's a long time coming,' Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Nash), one of the bill sponsors, told the Senate Health Committee during a Wednesday hearing. 'I think it's one of the most bipartisan issues we have.' When they discussed the bill Wednesday, the Senate committee members heard concerns from a lawyer and adoptive parents that the bill would discourage infant adoptions. The bill gives a biological father up to three months after a child's birth, when he is not married to the child's mother, to acknowledge paternity or attempt to form a relationship with the child before his parental rights are terminated. If a possible father finds out that a woman has fraudulently concealed her pregnancy or a child's birth, he would have up to 30 days after finding out to acknowledge paternity before his parental rights are terminated. 'From an adoptive parent perspective, this bill is frankly terrifying,' said Natalie Carscadden, an adoptive parent. 'Imagine the anxiety that comes when a person who's never met or shown any interest in a child suddenly appears in requests for custody up to a three-month time span after that child is born. This would upset the status quo and put significantly more legal risk on potential adoptive families.' In the committee discussion Thursday, Chesser referenced a court decision on a father's right to act within a 'timely manner.' 'What we are doing is defining what a timely manner means,' he said. The Senate combined the measure with three other bills that have passed the House: House Bill 795, which extends financial assistance for guardians who are related to children who won't be adopted or returned to their parents. Payments through the Kinship Guardianship Assistance Program could start when children are 10. Under current law, children have to be 14 or older. House Bill 162 would have cities and counties require criminal background checks for any person they plan to hire who would work with children. House Bill 182, which would allow judges to issue permanent 'no contact' orders against people convicted of violent crimes.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The blueprint for GOP Medicaid work requirements was laid down 175 years ago
The author sees obvious parallels between the policies of the British government in its treatment of Irish peasants during The Great Famine (1845-1849) and modern Medicaid work requirements in the U.S. The thatched roof of the house in this image is being removed to prevent it being re-tenanted. Original publication - Illustrated London News - The Ejectment Of Irish Tenantry - pub. 16th December 1848 (Photo by Illustrated London News /) North Carolina Republican lawmakers are advancing legislation that would impose work requirements on people enrolled in the Medicaid health insurance program. It's not a new idea. As NC Newsline's Lynn Bonner reported last week, North Carolina's hard won 2023 Medicaid expansion law already includes a provision requiring the state Department of Health and Human Services to pursue work requirements — that is, to condition eligibility for benefits on enrollees having a job — if it can secure federal approval for such a plan. The Biden administration rejected this idea, but it's expected that a federal HHS department under Trump would approve it (if, that is, there's anyone left at the department after recent mass firings to review such a proposal). But, of course, the idea of conditioning public assistance programs on a demonstration of 'worthiness' by those in need goes back a lot further than 2023. Affluent people in positions of power – many of whom inherited their wealth and almost all of whom benefit greatly from tax breaks and subsidies designed to protect it — have long employed such a strategy to restrict aid programs. Indeed, as author Padraic X. Scanlan documents in a powerful new book, one of the seminal examples in western history took place way back in the mid-19th Century. Scanlan's book is entitled 'Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine,' and in it he details a series of terrible events and policy decisions that led to one of the great human disasters of recent centuries. The Potato Famine – a calamity also often referred to as 'The Great Hunger' – is an event of which many Americans (nearly 10% of whom claim some Irish ancestry) still have a general awareness. The massive blight affecting the main crop that sustained Irish peasants caused as many as two million people to die of starvation and disease or flee the tiny country – many of whom ended up migrating to the U.S. The carnage was so massive that the Irish population today has still yet to recover to the level it was at prior to the famine. What most people have much less familiarity with, however, are the circumstances that turned a series of crop failures into a massive human catastrophe. As Scanlan details (and journalist Fintan O'Toole neatly summarizes in a recent essay in The New Yorker entitled, 'What made the Irish famine so deadly'), one of the chief contributors to the famine was the refusal of the British politicians and landowners who ruled Ireland to distribute relief because they thought it would violate rules of the free market and indulge the peasants. Convinced that dispensing free food to starving people would make them slothful, British leaders instead established a kind of 'workfare' program in which hungry people were forced to work – at below market wages – in hopes of staying alive. O'Toole's essay summarizes the situation this way: 'The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.' If this sounds familiar, it should, because the premise for Medicaid work requirements – that providing access to health care to people not gainfully employed enriches the undeserving and encourages harmful sloth and dependence — is precisely the same. Of course, one of the ironies of the recent action in Raleigh is that the sponsors of Medicaid work requirements are, among Republicans anyway, the liberals in this discussion. GOP state Rep. Donny Lambeth, a Forsyth County Republican who long championed Medicaid expansion and helped convince his GOP colleagues to accept it a decade after it became an option, has rightfully stated that plans under consideration among congressional Republicans to gut Medicaid with hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts would be 'a disaster.' He's actually pitching the enactment of work requirements as, in effect, a kind of human sacrifice to hard right politicians bent on vastly more devastating cuts to the program. It's a remarkable state of affairs. Like their pompous predecessors in the bygone British Empire, Republican leaders who control the federal government and the North Carolina legislature are callously and offensively debating two options for how best to deal with low-income people at risk of dying if they lose their health insurance: a) making them work or do community service to keep getting it, or b) simply cutting them loose altogether. Talk about history repeating itself. As O'Toole notes, 'Above all, 'Rot' reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the ascendant,' even if, as he adds ruefully, the chance of other countries taking in millions of starving migrants probably can't happen today. As he and Scanlan might have also added, Medicaid work requirements won't kill as many people as the 19th Century pro-starvation policies of the British in Ireland, but many undoubtedly will die prematurely and the maddening arrogance of the policy makers in the two situations is essentially indistinguishable.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
A celebration of the Affordable Care Act at an uncertain time for Medicaid
NC Medicaid director Jay Ludlam talks about the consequences of federal cuts to Medicaid at Martin Street Baptist Church in Raleigh on March 24, 2025. (Photo: Lynn Bonner) A celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act came with warnings of potential cuts to Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, was signed into law about 15 years ago. Now, 1.6 million people in North Carolina are insured under some aspect of the law. Nearly 1 million people have subsidized health insurance through the ACA, and about 640,00 adults are enrolled in Medicaid under expansion, which the ACA allowed, and state leaders approved in 2023. Congressional Republicans are contemplating federal budget cuts that could erode Medicaid services and force people who enrolled in expanded Medicaid off of their health insurance. Republicans in the U.S. House are considering Medicaid cuts of up to $880 billion over 10 years. That would translate to a $27 billion funding decrease for North Carolina over 10 years. Medicaid improves residents' health and brings billions into the state's economy, state Medicaid director Jay Ludlam said Monday at Martin Street Baptist Church in Raleigh. 'Despite widespread support for North Carolina Medicaid, Congress is proposing massive cuts that will hurt North Carolina,' he said. The federal government pays 90% of the cost for people covered under Medicaid expansion. In North Carolina, hospitals pick up most of the rest. None of the costs come from state coffers. Congress could decide to reduce federal support for people covered under expanded Medicaid. If that happens, current state law says that Medicaid expansion will end, and people who use the insurance would lose it. Other Medicaid reductions under consideration in Congress would mean 'a cut to the number of people who are eligible, a cut of the number of services available, and a cut to what providers are paid,' Ludlam said. 'Bottom line, it means fewer people getting fewer services, and providers getting paid less,' he said. In all, 3.1 million North Carolinians use Medicaid as their health insurance. Forty percent or more of the residents in 29 mostly rural counties are enrolled in Medicaid, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. Older adults and people with disabilities account for 21% of the state's Medicaid enrollment but 54% of Medicaid spending, according to DHHS. Gov. Josh Stein and his administration have been warning about the consequences of Medicaid cuts for citizens and hospitals. The NC Navigator Consortium, which offers people advice about Medicaid plans and ACA marketplace insurance plans, is already facing a massive budget cut. In February, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced a 90% cut in navigator services grants. For the NC Navigator Consortium, that means a reduction from $7.5 million to $750,000, said director Nicholas Riggs. The Consortium is designed to provide one-on-one assistance to people searching for insurance coverage. Last year, it provided 124,000 people with one-on-one help, Riggs said. In 2017, the last time the Consortium had to absorb a big federal grant cut, it helped only 25,000 people, he said. Now that more people than ever need the Consortium's help, it doesn't have the capacity to provide it, Riggs said. Jennifer Snowhite of Winston-Salem said she and her husband, both artists, lived without health insurance for years because they couldn't afford it. 'When the ACA was first introduced, we jumped on board,' she said. A few years later, her husband saw a doctor for a cough. Later that day, they were told he had two tumors in his chest. 'To say we were terrified is the understatement of the year,' she said. The next day, she attended an ACA open enrollment event at a public library. There, Snowhite said, she sought out a Consortium navigator who worked with her for hours to find the best insurance plan. 'Thanks to her depth of knowledge of ACA coverage choices, we were able to find a plan to allow him to go out-of-network to see the doctors that he needed,' she said. When Snowhite was diagnosed with breast cancer a year later, she didn't have to worry about insurance coverage. She is now cancer free. Her husband's recovery meant he was able to launch a project that employed 150 people, she said. 'We are so incredibly fortunate to be the beneficiaries of the ACA as well as the NC Navigators,' she said. 'Without you, I fear we would now be a too-typical story of bankruptcy or far worse. Instead, we have so much to celebrate.'
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Threat of federal cuts looms large as NC legislators start budget meetings
The General Assembly's Joint Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee begins its budget review on Feb. 25, 2025. (Photo: Lynn Bonner) North Carolina legislators began public budget discussions Tuesday in the shadow of a giant question mark. How will North Carolina respond to any federal budget cuts? Republicans in the U.S. House have prepared a budget blueprint that would mean deep cuts to Medicaid, the government health insurance program for people with low incomes. 'In the next 60 days, we'll know what's going to happen, and it could change everything,' said state Sen. Jim Burgin (R-Harnett), a chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services budget committee. Congressional Republicans are also considering reductions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, and changes to a policy on school meals that would lead to cuts to breakfast and lunch programs, with fewer schools able to offer all students in high-poverty areas meals at no charge. The U.S. House and Senate must agree on a budget before it goes to President Donald Trump. That agreement isn't expected until April or May at the earliest. North Carolina's budget year ends on June 30. Legislative budget committees are starting to dig into the details of state agency spending this week. The federal cuts to safety net programs would help pay for the tax cuts and immigration plans that top President Donald Trump's domestic agenda. More than a third of the money North Carolina spends each year comes from the federal government. In fiscal year 2023, 37.5% of the money the state spent was federal money, according to a National Association of State Budget Officers report. Much of that federal money flows to the state Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Medicaid program. The reliance on federal funds for health was reinforced Tuesday at the legislative committee that began to review the state DHHS budget. The agency's budget this year is nearly $40.7 billion, with Medicaid accounting for nearly $32.8 billion of that. About $6.2 billion of North Carolina's Medicaid costs are paid from state coffers. The federal government picks up most of the rest. Burgin said in an interview he hopes Congress approaches Medicaid cuts with a scalpel rather than a meat cleaver. DHHS touches everybody in the state all the time, he said, and they don't even realize it. 'I want North Carolina to be the healthiest state in the country and I want us to control our costs while we do it.' Rep. Allen Buansi (D-Orange), a member of the House health budget committee, said he is 'gravely concerned,' about potential federal cuts. 'We depend a lot on our federal government when it comes to health and human services,' he said. Republicans in the U.S. House have discussed reducing federal support for adults who have insurance coverage due to Medicaid expansion. The federal government picks up 90% of the cost of people covered under Medicaid expansion. In North Carolina, the state doesn't cover any of the costs. North Carolina is one of nine states that has a statutory trigger that ends Medicaid expansion if the federal government stops paying 90%. More than 600,000 North Carolinians enrolled in expanded Medicaid in the year after the state enacted it in December 2023. U.S. House Republicans are also considering changing Medicaid so that it pays a set amount per person rather than paying for a percentage of allowable costs. Sen. Ralph Hise (R-Mitchell), a chairman of the Senate budget committee, said he didn't see a point in speculating when the U.S. House and Senate are far from an agreement on cuts. 'I don't see a lot of value in guessing,' he said. Aside from the federal budget debate, what North Carolina does know is that the overall percentage of Medicaid costs the federal government will pick up is expected to drop over the next two years, Hise said. The federal government calculates its Medicaid support for states based on average per capita income relative to other states. North Carolina has been doing well, so the federal reimbursement percentage has been dropping, and will continue to drop over the next two years, said Hise. Preliminary estimates put the loss at $1.3 billion over two years, he said. Helene road repair costs Members of the Joint Appropriations Committee on Transportation heard the sobering news that the projected cost to repair all the roads and bridges damaged by Hurricane Helene will be just shy of $5 billion. And while more than $432 million has been spent to date on repairs, that represents less than 9% of the cost estimates, with thousands of rebuild projects remaining. Department of Transportation engineers also cautioned lawmakers that redirecting dollars from the deferred maintenance fund to address Helene damage would leave fewer dollars to improve road conditions in other regions of the state. NC Newsline's Clayton Henkel contributed to this report.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Documenting the damage of Judge Jefferson Griffin's Supreme Court election challenge
Voters line up outside the Durham Main Library in the November 2024 election. (Photo: Lynn Bonner) As members of the Student Voting Rights Lab at Duke and North Carolina Central Universities, we have found abundant and incontrovertible evidence that youth voters in North Carolina – citizens between the ages of 18 and 25 – are disproportionately represented in Judge Jefferson Griffin's challenge of the results in the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court election. Among the 61,150 thousand voters with allegedly 'incomplete voter registrations,' young voters are 3.4 times more likely than voters over 65 to have their votes challenged. Young Black voters, meanwhile, are 5.28 times more likely to be challenged than white men over the age of 65. The attack on youth voting rights is also vividly present in the Griffin campaign's challenge to overseas voters. He included just four Democratic majority counties in this part of his challenge: Durham, Guilford, Forsyth, and Buncombe, each of them home to large numbers of college students. The results are predictable if still shocking: young voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are 4.6 times more likely than voters over the age of 65 to be in this portion of the challenge. Although a far whiter cohort than voters with allegedly incomplete voter registrations, these young overseas voters are 4.7 times likely to be Democrats than Republicans. Griffin argues that his challenge will protect the integrity of North Carolina's electorate by excluding voters who have 'illegal' voter registrations and overseas voters who were not required to show photo IDs. But the partisan and anti-youth biases in his challenges reveal their true purpose: to flip the outcome of a free and fair election that he lost by silencing young progressive voters. He offers disfranchisement as the remedy to the clerical challenges evident in the uneven record keeping practices of the North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBOE). Such behavior is neither fair nor impartial and is beneath the dignity of a Supreme Court Justice. The Griffin campaign seeks to evade responsibility for these harms by blaming the SBOE for, as it claims, knowingly breaking the law by not requiring citizens to list the last four digits of their Social Security numbers when registering to vote. It has also suggested that the overseas voters in his challenge are not genuine North Carolinians, but outsiders seeking to interfere in an election in which they should not vote. In his revisionist account, Griffin is the victim — an honorable white man standing up for virtue and election integrity. But research by the Student Voting Rights Lab into the voter registration histories of student voters reveals the absence of negligence on their part. We have thus far located 23 Duke students in the Griffin challenge who either retained copies of their original voter registration forms or who requested copies of them from the Durham County Board of Elections after learning they had been challenged. Given the fact that all of them are listed as having incomplete voter registrations in North Carolina's voter registration database, we expected most of them to have left the Social Security number section blank in their voter registration forms. What we discovered, however, was striking and consistent. Of these 23 students, 22 correctly listed the last four digits of their social security numbers. Our research is ongoing. But the compliance rate to the Social Security number requirement – at 96% — is stunning. The case of Sofia Dib-Gomez, a member of the Student Voting Rights Lab, illustrates not only the absence of negligence among the challenged, but a dedication to improving democracy and helping her peers be counted and heard. Sofia began her studies at Duke University in the fall of 2024 and registered to vote in Durham County during her second week on campus. As a volunteer for Duke Votes, the nonpartisan student organization tasked with leading Duke's voter registration efforts, Dib-Gomez knew well that citizens on campus without a North Carolina driver's license needed to list the last four digits of their Social Security number on their voter registration forms. She personally registered several hundred of her fellow students, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, to vote before the October 4th deadline. Every one of them did so correctly. When she learned she was on the list of challenged voters, Dib-Gomez called the Durham County Board of Elections and requested a copy of her own original voter registration form. When it arrived, it clearly indicated her SSN was on the form. The Durham official could not explain why her Social Security number had not been entered into her vote registration file, but they reassured her in an email that her vote would count. That reassurance, however well-intended, rings hollow in light of the Griffin campaign's ongoing challenge to more than 61,150 voters. Indeed, Dib-Gomez and the 22 fellow Duke students whose voter registration forms we have verified are all still listed as having incomplete voter registrations at the SBOE. We do not know how, when, or why election officials in Durham did not put these voters' last four Social Security numbers into their voter registration files, nor why their voter registrations have not been corrected. But the response to Dib-Gomez suggests that the resources required to fix and update voter registrations are in short supply, especially as officials struggle to keep up with the volume of requests the Griffin challenge has generated. The delayed response by the Durham County BOE to fixing omissions in voters' registrations reveals no malevolence, however, and certainly not a pattern of willful lawbreaking as Griffin suggests. Rather, it highlights a deeper problem within boards of election: the lack of labor, time, and human resources required to maintain up-to-date voter registrations. The case of Duke student Katherine Gallagher, also a member of the Student Voting Rights Lab, further illuminates the record keeping challenge that local boards face in maintaining up to date voter registration records. Gallagher was first registered to vote in Forsyth County when she received her driver's license at the age of 16. When she moved to Durham and re-registered to vote she left the SSN section blank — the one student we have thus far found who did not list the last four digits of her Social Security number. But that omission should not have mattered because Katherine knew the SBOE had her North Carolina driver's license number. Unfortunately, the number seems to have been lost and not to have traveled with her when she re-registered. We do not know why that driver's license number was not included when she updated her registration. When Gallagher learned her ballot was challenged, she called the Durham County BOE and was reassured that her vote would count because she had showed her driver's license to county officials at the polls. Like Dib-Gomez, however, Gallagher 's voter registration record remains listed in BOE records as being incomplete. Gallagher is not alone among North Carolinians who have valid driver's license numbers listed in SBOE records, but who have wound up in the Griffin challenge anyhow. We have found 1,008 citizens among the 61,000 challenged voters who have valid North Carolina driver's license numbers that are already filed at the SBOE, but whose numbers remain disconnected to their current registration files. More striking, we have located 3,822 voters within the challenge whose Social Security numbers are listed as complete in one set of BOE records, but who are still listed as possessing incomplete voter registrations. Updating the voter registration files within the NCBOE has become a pressing challenge in light of the Griffin campaign's efforts to disfranchise thousands of North Carolinians. But that kind of election work requires funding which has been notoriously difficult to extract from the Republican dominated North Carolina legislature over the past decade. The SBOE's work of record keeping has also grown harder of late, with difficult choices between keeping voter registrations up to date, making sure election workers are well trained, maintaining consistent ways of counting the growing number of provisional ballots cast across the state, and responding to thousands of anxious voters who are in the Griffin challenge. Given the additional burdens of a global pandemic in 2020 and a disastrous hurricane in 2024, it is remarkable how well BOE officials have managed their central tasks over the past several election cycles. Considering the fact that North Carolina's new voter photo ID requirement has obviated the need to use Social Security numbers to verify citizens' identities, it seems unwise to ask the SBOE to devote scarce resources to updating voter registration information. Indeed, the Griffin campaign's emphasis on SSNs indirectly challenges the primacy of the new photo ID law by suggesting that Social Security numbers are more important than state approved photo IDs. That decision has already been made by the voters of North Carolina in 2018 when they voted for a constitutional amendment to make photo identification the key form of voter verification. The biggest portion of the Griffin challenge may be unconstitutional. That has not stopped the Griffin team from using the photo ID law to challenge the voting rights of a different cohort of voters, however: overseas voters who did are not required to present election officials with verifiable photo ID when voting. Now a defender of the photo ID requirement, Griffin's campaign argues these voters have violated the state's constitution. But the practice of exempting overseas voters from the photo ID requirement is based in law and resembles the exemptions that many voters filed across North Carolina during the 2024 election who did not have access to securing authorized photo IDs. Requiring university students studying abroad to produce student ID cards that are only available on home campuses, for example, is clearly an unreasonable burden to voting. That burden also applies to North Carolina's military service people who do not have access to their photo IDs when serving in combat. Seeking to avoid the unpopular optic of disfranchising active-duty military personnel, Griffin has instead focused on university students, choosing to challenge overseas voters hailing from just four student heavy counties. But the case of Duke student Olivia Schramkowski, another member of the Student Voting Rights Lab, illustrates the unfairness and inconsistency of this portion of the Griffin challenge. A devoted North Carolina voter, Schramkowski spent the fall semester studying in London, but was dedicated to helping fellow college students in North Carolina cast ballots in the 2024 election. Like Dib-Gomez and Gallagher, she consulted with Durham County BOE officials to make sure she knew what was required of her and voters like her. She offered to send a copy of her photo ID along with her absentee ballot, but was told by an official with the NCBOE that 'photo ID is not required for absentee ballots requested through FPCA,' (the Federal Post Card Application). With that assurance in mind, Schramkowski authored a non-partisan guide on how to vote while living abroad, shared it with Duke administrators and members of the Student Voting Rights Lab, and helped 264 Duke students successfully cast their ballots. Now, every one of these North Carolinians finds their ballots challenged. Throughout the unfolding of Judge Griffin's challenge, the candidate has claimed to be a victim of illegal balloting and the actions of the SBOE, while presenting himself as a defender of election integrity. Our research, however, documents the harm Griffin is causing to the very communities he should be defending as a potential North Carolina Supreme Court justice. If youth voting rights in North Carolina were secure, the supportive messages from county election officials to challenged young voters would indeed be reassuring. Sadly, young citizens find their ballots and their rights attacked by a judicial candidate posing as an impartial public servant. Because young North Carolinians citizens are the future of our state, these harms extend beyond one judicial election and one election cycle to the voting rights of every North Carolinian. The members of the Student Voting Rights Lab who contributed research and/or testimonies for use in this commentary are Abdel Shehata, Sofia Dib-Gomez, Katherine Gallagher, Rhiannon Camarillo, Liv Schramkowski, Annika Aristimuno, and Jessie Rievman. My thanks go out to all of the students participating in the Student Voting Rights Lab for their insights, moral energy, and curiosity. I especially thank my Co-Director, Professor Artemesia Stanberry of the Political Science Department at NCCU. – Prof. Gunther Peck
