Utah’s governor says a conservative group working against his alternative to expanding Medicaid isn’t telling the truth. The issue came up at the governor's monthly news conference this morning.
A Florida-based issue group, the Foundation for Government Accountability, has been placing ads on social media in Utah, asking residents to oppose Governor Gary Herbert’s Healthy Utah plan. Links in the ad go to a website called “Unhealthy Utah,” which calls the plan an expansion of Obamacare. Herbert told his monthly news conference on KUED that’s just not true – that his plan is significantly different from the expansion of Medicaid originally proposed under the Affordable Care Act.
Herbert told reporters, “Well, I don’t mind having discussion and debate about the issue. I think that’s healthy. I just want it to be truthful. And I don’t think it’s right for somebody from outside of Utah to come in and try to direct, for whatever their political purposes are, and distort what we’re trying to present to the legislature and the people of Utah.”
Members of the policy team for FGA posted an op-edpiece on the Forbes magazine website last month, criticizing the Healthy Utah plan. They say few details of the plan have been released to the public.
The governor responded with a point-by-pointdefense on his own website. He says many of the details have already been discussed extensively in public, and he’s promised to provide a printed summary for a legislative task force early next month.
