There is one lesson from the first chapters of Genesis that should have significance for legislators struggling with the expansion of Medicaid in Virginia.
The story goes that God created Adam and Eve and put them in a marvelous garden, where they should have been happy. Yet these perfect people in the marvelous garden responded to the temptation to eat the one thing they were not supposed to consume. They finally ate the forbidden fruit and God had to tweak his plan for them. It was rather a violent tweak, but it is not my story to edit.
Whether you take the story of Adam and Eve as metaphor or just the fair and balanced factual report of what happened, you should notice that one of the first ideas written down in human history and Christian scripture was that rollouts are rocky.
So just expand Medicaid. Or pass the Senate bill – that is better than nothing, and much better than two more years of study. The template is there, the money is there, and you aren’t going to do any better than God did in the first rollout. It won’t be perfect, but people will be able to go to the doctor when they are sick, and doctors and hospitals will be able to get paid. And that will be a good thing.
Having the Adam and Eve story to draw upon, we can possibly do a little better with the inevitable tweaking.
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Life in the Third Layer 