Editorial Roundup: North Carolina

Winston-Salem Journal. June 4, 2022.

Editorial: A hopeful development

Recent changes in the Medicaid expansion landscape have generated new glimmers of hope — for greater access to health care and for the possibility of bipartisan cooperation. Our state needs both to meet the challenges ahead.

Finally, after years of committed opposition, many state Republican leaders have come around to supporting Medicaid expansion, which would provide access to health care for between 450,000 and 650,000 North Carolinians who have none — including around 25,500 in Forsyth County and 35,000 in Guilford.

But let’s not get our hopes up too far. There’s still a hurdle ahead.

House Bill 149, approving a form of Medicaid coverage, passed the state Senate on a 44-1 vote on Thursday, the Journal’s Richard Craver reported. Only one Pamlico County Republican voted against it.

But it has to pass a vote in the House before reaching Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk.

There, Speaker Tim Moore, a steadfast opponent of Medicaid expansion, has signaled that he’s not likely to allow the chamber to take up the bill before the 2022 session ends in early July. He says it’s too complex and time too limited, according to The Associated Press.

Rep. Donny Lambeth of Forsyth County, the lead Republican proponent of Medicaid expansion in the House, said Thursday that “I do not anticipate that the House will take up the Senate bill.”

So close, yet so far away.

Medicaid expansion has passed through several configurations since it was first proposed as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Back then, many states declined to adopt it — some simply because it came from President Obama’s administration.

Many Republicans worked to overturn “Obamacare” through legislative or court action. (Though battered, it survives.)

North Carolina sat and watched for a good decade while other states accepted Medicaid expansion and the federal funds that accompanied it — including quite a few red states. None that accepted it have later rescinded their acceptance. It seems to work.

Still, our Republican-led legislature was reluctant.

Senate leader Phil Berger was a strong opponent, citing concerns about the federal government upholding its commitment to pay 90% of the expense for expansion.

But he also opposed options that allowed North Carolina to back out if the federal government backed out, or even rejected federal funds entirely.

So it’s dramatic — and commendable — that he’s now become a supporter. Berger says that accepting federal money to cover more low-income adults now makes fiscal sense for the state.

He joins other Republicans who have been pushing, both publicly and behind the scenes, to find some form of Medicaid expansion that could pass without entangling the state more deeply with the federal government.

The current bill contains a work requirement that the House has pushed for — and that will likely face some pushback from the federal government — but was necessary to get it this far.

The bill also loosens certificate-of-need medical laws that make our state more attractive to for-profit groups — a development that Sens. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, and Ralph Hise, R-McDowell, support.

“This comprehensive strategy will reduce the cost and increase the availability of care across the state while offering a lifeline for our rural hospitals,” Hise told the Journal last week.

Despite this support, expansion still has to pass the House. Berger said on Wednesday that “there are 120 (House legislators) on the other side of this building that we’ve got to start work on.

“I’m going to do my part of that, and I ask that all of you do it as well.”

So we’re closer, much closer, than we were.

In the meantime, bipartisan cooperation is carrying the day on other issues. Rep. Harry Warren, a Rowan County Republican, is sponsoring legislation that would make it illegal for gas-powered vehicles to block EV chargers, on public or private property.

“These stations each need to be accessible to consumers in order to facilitate their travel,” he told the Journal’s John Deem last week. The bill received bipartisan support in the House with a 115-4 vote in March 2021.

Facilitating travel facilitates the tourism industry, which we hope will be in full swing this summer.

And despite apprehension from some quarters, the proposal to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes is making its way through state chambers in a bipartisan fashion, with a 35-10 Senate vote on Thursday.

Bipartisan cooperation is possible and praiseworthy when it improves the lives of North Carolina residents.

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Charlotte Observer/Raleigh News and Observer. June 6, 2022.

Editorial: NC legislators need lunch cost solution for public school students

Schools have been returning to normal, for better or for worse, over the last two years. The next “normal” comes at the end of June, when the federal government will let the sun set on universal free school lunch. For people who work in education policy, the impending cutoff has been a concern for months.

School lunches are stereotyped as unappetizing and unhealthy, but they are also a way to combat the 30% of children in North Carolina who live in “economically distressed” households, and face food insecurity as a result. About 860,000 of North Carolina’s public school students are eligible to participate in free or reduced lunch programs — about 60% of all public school students.

A presentation in a General Assembly meeting by Lynn Harvey, the director of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s Division of School Nutrition and District Operations, detailed how cutting off these programs and returning to normal would be “catastrophic” for the state’s school lunch program, since a decrease in students eating school lunch means less money going back into the program. She was met with resistance from Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Jamie Bowles (R-Moore), who said that the “socialization” of school lunch takes responsibility away from families that should be providing food.

So what do we do about children possibly going hungry if they can’t afford school lunch?

There’s anecdotal evidence that students who need help already fall through the cracks of eligibility — which makes sense when you think about places like Mecklenburg County, where there’s a backlog of SNAP benefit applications, a program that also involves enrolling students in free lunch automatically. All Title 1 schools already offer free lunches for everyone, and that won’t change when the COVID funding runs out. But not all students who need help attend Title 1 schools. It’s unclear how many students are in need of a cheaper or free lunch option and not getting it.

Despite pushback in committee, two bills have been introduced in the state Senate, as well as one bill in the N.C. House, that would make free breakfast and lunch available to all North Carolina students. The bills give different estimates for how much the cost: the Senate bills estimate it’ll cost around $92.7 million to fund breakfast and lunch, while the House estimates that it’ll be closer to $159.2 million for both. It’s a lot of money, but Kris Nordstrom, a senior policy analyst at the North Carolina Justice Center, said the former number would be about a 1% increase on the current schools budget.

“There’s a moral argument that kids deserve free and nutritious and delicious breakfasts and lunches in schools, because they deserve free nutritious and delicious breakfasts and lunches,” Nordstrom said, “because they’re children.”

We agree, but we’re uncertain free lunches for everyone is the most efficient way to get there. There are other options: the state could adjust the goalposts and allow students whose families make more than 185% of the poverty line to also participate in reduced-price lunch. There’s also the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows schools who qualify to offer free lunch for all students. Under President Biden’s stalled Build Back Better plan, the CEP threshold would have been lower, allowing more schools to participate. Lots of schools, however, currently can’t afford to participate.

With COVID money going away, North Carolina lawmakers and school officials should promptly explore how best to ensure that needy students aren’t going hungry during their school days, as nutritious meals have been linked to better cognitive function and ultimately, better test scores.

Wanting students to be fed in a place where they spend so much of their time should not be controversial, no matter what you think the solution should be.

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