To the Editor,
This November, Idahoans will vote “yes” or “no” on whether our state should expand Obamacare through Proposition 2. 
The biggest problem of all is that your taxpayer money will be taken to help pay for expanded Obamacare instead of going to our schools and repairing our roads. Not good.  
I receive more calls and messages from people in District 7 who are angry with our schools not being adequately funded and our roads not being repaired quickly enough. Not once have I received a phone call from someone in “the gap” who can’t afford healthcare.  That is why I have not supported Medicaid expansion as a legislator. 
Idaho’s Medicaid program already covers children in low-income families. It already covers people with disabilities. It already covers pregnant women living in poverty. Healthcare coverage for the needy and vulnerable is not up for debate. 
What is up for debate is free Obamacare coverage for those who don’t need it as much described in the proposition as “certain individuals”: healthy (not disabled), working age (not elderly), and mostly childless adults. 
The potential new Obamacare enrollees already have options available for obtaining affordable insurance. Obamacare already offers subsidies that make health insurance incredibly affordable. Comprehensive insurance plans are available to individuals through the state-run exchange, Your Health Idaho, for as little as $11 dollars per month, with no deductible. 
I think that people should have safety nets. And I think they should have access to affordable health insurance. But expanding Obamacare would primarily offer free healthcare to those who can acquire it for themselves. 
Do you want better schools and roads, or do you want to pay for other people’s healthcare?  Now the choice is yours: government healthcare for some or infrastructure that serves everyone.  Eventually you may be paying for both.  Please vote NO on prop 2 on November 6th.
Representative Priscilla Giddings
District 7A

Expansion of Medicaid?
Good or false philanthropy?  Consider Idaho’s Prop 2: Medicaid Expansion.  Many say “What about the sick, the lame, the “poor”, or this case, low income “able bodied adults”?  They say, “Let’s turn to the law.  The law will solve it”.  But if passed, can the law alone solve it? Is the law itself the breast that fills itself with milk?  Nothing enters the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen without forcefully “taking” from another citizen…unless the program relies alone on donations (any of our 39 State agencies and additional 200+ sub agencies sustained solely on donations?).  Law is a force “to take”.  Is it a good force?  Well, if I am put in jail for robbing someone to pay for my medical bills, are the citizens of Idaho (not members of the legislature in this case because this is a citizens’ initiative) going to jail for “plundering” me by the “force” of law to pay their neighbors medical bills?  This isn’t a harsh judgement or a non-charitable position.  It rightly asks the long term question, how can a program be sustaining if it injures one group of people to benefit another group?  Is it not possible to have unintended consequences of “well intended” legislation, or poor legislation?  If we want respect for laws, we have to have respectable laws.  My greatest concern though of charity law(s), regardless of the law, is this: the more people look to government to “provide” the more they act like subjects and not a free people.   Is the “land of the free and home of the brave” a fading legend?   
But you may continue to say “Let’s turn to the Law” to solve this issue.  I ask again “Is the law by itself the breast that fills itself with milk”?  So far, not in Idaho.   The distributors of the “milk of nourishment”, Idaho’s Health and Welfare, brags the largest (or 2nd largest) budget: $3 billion, $2.6 + billion by force of law (not donations) and near $0.4 billion borrowed.  So who’s on the hook to pay this borrowed money back?  Yep, your name, and my name are on that note.  Add that to your mortgage, current medical bill, vehicle payment, grocery bills.  So do we need another law?  
(By the way, I don’t know if Prop 2 is a truly an Idaho citizens’ initiative.  Issue, yes.  Initiative, no.   The major funding for this ballot proposition, according to my research at Idaho’s Secretary of State office, came from Washington D.C. not Idaho; it’s from the same company that paid for this same initiative to be run in Utah and Nebraska along with Idaho this November.  A phone call and research to the State of Utah and State of Nebraska confirmed this).
Scott Perrin
Cottonwood, Idaho 

Letter to the Editor
These past weeks listening and watching the belittlement of our justice system and of taking down of an honorable and reputable man, Brett Kavanaugh (now U S Supreme Court Justice) was the most sickening and un-American thing I have ever seen in my lifetime.
If you believe in your God given rights, the laws of our land, the right to life, the right to bear arms and if you love America and you love Idaho, you must get to the polls and vote for the party that believes in your rights as citizens.
Vote for all our Republican candidates on November 6
Reminder “Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”
Marge Arnzen
Cottonwood

Redneck Review!
No. 182 - 10/15/2018
Interesting what one gets in the mail or sees on the news these days!  Or gets  in the mail from a periodical of some kind!  In my case, all three of these sources came to my attention lately as I tried to catch up this morning after spending a weekend in Boise ID at a wedding of a grand daughter of ours!
First, the news.  Recently a news item reported that increasing costs of paper stock and fees for delivery were causing several daily papers across the United States financial problems threatening their existence.  Reported bluntly there were some that had ceased production for that very reason. 
Then from a news letter I receive monthly came the disturbing news from publishing tech giant Facebook news executive Campbell Brown who recently "warned a group of publishers that if we don't work with the social media giant, 'I will be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice.' " The news letter continued, the "Simple truth is as more independent publications...go under, the more cemented into place the tech elite's monopoly grows."
The same news letter printed the following statement, and I quote: "The Alliance for Audited Media confirms that daily newspaper circulation across the United states has dropped 43%."
Finally, in the mail came a little envelope with the simple address:  Jake Wren     P.O. Box  Cottonwood ID  83533,  with a short note on a 2" by 4" card:  "True freedom lies in doing what you ought to do, not what you want to do."  Then directly below that was written: "What you ought to do is subscribe to your local newspaper."  PERIOD!  That was it!  No signature! No way of knowing  who the author was!  No return address on the envelope, just simply 
printed "Spokane WA 99010.   Hey! I do subscribe to the local paper, The Chronicle!  
And note that there was no box number!  Just P.O. Box? And the zip code on the envelope was 83533, not the correct 83522!  Amazing!  Makes one wonder how it even got here!  And to add further to the mystery was the irony of the "True freedom is what you ought to do..." That was a definition of real freedom that I used repeatedly in my classes in history and economics during my 50+ years of teaching!  Finally, also in the little envelope was a copy of a letter to the editor of the Lewiston Tribune that I had submitted earlier that simply said "Goodbye"  "Hard to do but please discontinue my subscription." After nearly 40 years as a subscriber,  I noted I was forced to quit because of the relentless effort on the part of the editorial page cartoons ridiculing Pres Trump and his supreme court nominee. Two huge articles in a recent Sunday paper made it sound like confirmed justice Kavanaugh was guilty of not only the charge levied against him 36 years earlier by a high school girl, but of other things in college like "gang rape!"  
Further aggravating my reaction, there was not a single word in either article noting that he had been investigated without charge SIX times earlier by the FBI  as he moved from one sensitive area in government to another.  Nor was there a single word noting that a seventh FBI  week long investigation reported no significant evidence that the event had happened, or if it had, that it involved Kavanaugh!  Sloppy reporting!  And I am inclined to say: UnAmerican!  We rely on our press to investigate and give us the facts and the truth, and I bluntly charged the Tribune with falling into the clutches of enemies of our country who are determined to destroy our way of life!  If this was truly the case, then a paper I have learned to love because of its sports and its other features we rely on deserves to grow broke and out of circulation! And I am continuing to sneak a peek now and then to see if its cartoon selection changes! Then I would hurry to renew!
Jake Wren

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