L.P. Candidate Sean Haugh Makes No Bones About His Support for Medicaid Expansion

Most of Sean Haugh’s positions are pretty
much what you would expect from a Libertarian Party candidate.
Haugh, who’s running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, favors
legalizing marijuana and opposes any restrictions on abortion. He
says his top priority is to end “all war.” But nestled among the
unremarkable is one stance that’s, well, not like the others.
The Weekly Standard
reports:

Asked if he thought it was a mistake to reject additional
federal funding to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, Haugh replied,
“I do.”

“The rejection of the Medicaid expansion dollars—which on the
surface you could kind of make a libertarian case for—but the end
users have suffered.”

The notion that choosing not to expand a massive welfare program
is only “kind of” a libertarian thing to do is a bit of a head
scratcher. Federal grants to the states for Medicaid and the Child
Health Insurance Program totaled $265 billion in 2012. Under
Obamacare, states can get even more money in exchange for agreeing
to let a wider population, including non-disabled adults without
children, into the program.

A number of states, including North Carolina, have opted to
forgo the extra funds after the Supreme Court in 2012 issued a
decision that safeguards their ability to do so without facing
retribution from Washington.

Haugh’s position seems to be that lawmakers in Raleigh were
wrong for not voluntarily adding another 800,000-or-so people to
their Medicaid rolls. In a July 12
Facebook post, the Senate hopeful went even
further, implying that when states don’t expand the program,
“people die.” As evidence, he linked to a
news story about a North Carolina hospital that will soon be
shuttered:

Vidant Health System executives cited North Carolina’s decision
not to participate in federally funded Medicaid expansion as a
factor in the decision to close the hospital.

Haugh, who has worked in the hospital industry, talked about
this issue at more length in a
video for his campaign website. “As a libertarian, I
definitely want to reform and eventually eliminate federal
involvement in health care,” he says in the video. “But I’ll be
damned if I’m going to throw grandma out on the street to
accomplish that.”