The Week in "We Hate Tom Corbett and Hope He Dies News"

Well, as always, there's lots of good reasons to hate Pennsylvania based Governor Tom Corbett this week and to wish that his term in office ends come November.

The first item comes to us from The Real News, one of the best alternative news sites in the country. Where we learn that all of the states that have not accepted the initially free Medicaid money are literally condemning 17000 of their citizens to death. I've heard higher numbers. Pennsylvania, thanks to my gawdawful governor Tom Corbett, is one of those states. So, for the first time in my life, I live in a less progressive and caring state than Kentucky. Here's a quote from the story:

DESVARIEUX: So, according to your study, nearly 8 million people will not be able to access health insurance because their states opted out. Can you give us a rundown of the health consequences for these 8 million people?

WOOLHANDLER: Yes. Well, we'll expect between 7,000 and 17,000 of those people to die. We'll expect about three-quarters of a million, 750,000 people to experience depression that they would have been spared had they had access to health care. We'll also see that many diabetics will not have access to medications to treat their condition and that women who need pap smears and mammograms will not get the pap smears and mammograms that they need. So we're going to see a lot of adverse health consequences from what is essentially a political refusal by the red state governors to accept the Medicaid expansion.

DESVARIEUX: And these red state governors, they really have been coming out saying that they cannot afford to expand Medicaid. What's your response to that?

WOOLHANDLER: Well, that's completely ridiculous. The first three years of the Medicaid expansion are 100 percent funded by the federal government, and thereafter the expansion is 90 percent funded by the federal government. And, you remember, these billions are going to go into--if they accepted the money, billions would have gone into the state to pay for the hospitals, to pay for hospital workers, doctors, supplies. So it would have been money that would have gone to their states' economies. So there's absolutely no economic argument for turning down the Medicaid expansion. The decision by the red state governors to turn down that expansion is purely political.

Two, there is some good news in that Tom Corbett's many awful policies have caused his polling numbers to collapse. He's getting creamed by just about every prominent Democratic Party nominee. Human Events, a conservative publication that bills itself as "powerful conservative voices" as opposed to "funded by right wing tyrants" which would be more accurate in my opinion, did two polls that shows Corbett getting roundly defeated. One poll showed that only 41 percent of registered Republicans think he deserves to be reelected. You're only considered safe if you're getting 50 percent of the overall electorate wants you back. Corbett can't even sell his own base.

The second poll reveals that 60 percent of the electorate, including democrats this time, want Corbett to be a one termer. Rob McCord, a democrat, soundly thrashed Corbett by a 48 percent o 36 percent margin. Democratic candidate Tom Wolf also handily beats Tom Corbett by about seven percentage points.

So there is hope that the Evil One will be dispatched come this November. Some of us would prefer that a giant dragon incinerate him but we will take a convincing election loss.