Indiana’s term-limited governor, highly unpopular with his GOP base, is pushing an overfunded public health plan that could steal local control from county officials. It’s yet another state-level example of Republican politicians selling out their own voters to bloated and harmful special interests.
The lame-duck governor and several top Republicans in the Republican-controlled legislature are clearly angling to get hired by Big Pharma after leaving public office, thereby using this sweetheart deal to eventually line their own pockets from one of the state’s largest lobbying interests.
Authoritarian orders delivered by Gov. Eric Holcomb and his health commissioner, Kris Box, are one of the reasons Holcomb was booed at his own party convention last June. Those destructive mandates masked kids, hobbled the economy, stunted education, and crushed mental health. Yet Holcomb now wants to increase the influence of this inept state health bureaucracy with an expensive plan designed to centralize more power at the state level. The package will incentivize county health departments to give up local control in return for huge wads of cash.
The governor wants the state legislature to give him 29 times the amount they currently provide for the state’s 95 health departments, from $6.9 million per year to $200 million per year. That financial ask alone tells you why Holcomb is not popular with base voters and won re-election with hundreds of thousands of Democrat votes. It is part of a whopping spending plan that even state Democrats can champion.
The governor used a crude formula
