Serving the High Plains

Letter to the Editor

A recent Quay County Sun editorial was headlined, “Lawmakers must find system to meet budget needs.”

It stated the state needs $85.2 million next year to meet the cost of extending Medicaid to the poor.

Let’s put a little sunshine on this claim.

The federal government covers 100 percent of the cost of extending Medicaid to the poor for the first three years. Support then shrinks to 90 percent over the next 10 years.

New Mexico received $123,281,600 for research, planning, information technology, development and implementation of the market place.

The Urban Institute estimated the Affordable Care Act could save New Mexico up to $1.1 billion from 2014 to 2019, when all things are considered.

The ACA was also estimated to create from 38,000 to 47,000 new jobs.

Of course the Right to Work ideology will see to it that the jobs are low pay so the new employees will be eligible for ACA.

The percent of uninsured in New Mexico dropped from 20.2 percent to 15.3 percent in 2014.

None of the conservatives’ predicted calamities due to ACA have come true. The horror stories have not stood up to investigation.

I keep looking for a conservative think tank like Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute or our Rio Grande Foundation to come up with a comparison of the number of deaths due to no insurance in the “NO” states and the logical states; also the amounts saved by each group.

One Republican congressman called the ACA a “train wreck.”

The ACA is not perfect — conservatives made sure of that — but it is infinitely better than what we had.

Leon Logan

Tucumcari