Medicaid expansion tour kicks off

SANDPOINT — It was little more than a year ago when Luke Mayville came back to his hometown of Sandpoint to organize a door-to-door campaign advocating for local schools.

On Monday, he was back in town for another door-to-door campaign, but for a different reason.

"The goal is to talk with voters about the Medicaid expansion ballot initiative, and how important it is to vote yes for Medicaid expansion in November," Mayville said.

Since that first campaign in March 2017 to garner votes in favor of the Lake Pend Oreille School District's supplemental levy, Mayville co-founded Reclaim Idaho with a quest to get Medicaid expansion passed in Idaho. After months of campaigning, Mayville, along with Reclaim Idaho co-founder Garrett Strizich and many volunteers across the state, collected enough signatures to put Medicaid expansion on the November ballot.

The door-to-door initiative in Sandpoint on Monday kicked off the latest state tour for the Reclaim Idaho team. When Mayville first spoke with the Daily Bee in 2017 in regards to the levy, he said he was following the mantra, "door to door wins the war." He continues to follow that mantra as his team will meet up with volunteers in 20 Idaho communities over the course of 20 days to talk with voters about Medicaid expansion. And it was 20 local volunteers who met up with Mayville at Evans Brothers Coffee Roasters to help out with the door-to-door campaign.

The overarching reason for the effort, Mayville said, is that 62,000 Idahoans are currently without health care because they fall into the coverage gap. This means they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to qualify for Your Health Idaho, the state’s health insurance exchange created under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

"By voting yes for Medicaid expansion, we would cover those 62,000 people with health insurance" he said. "And we would cover them by bringing back millions of federal tax dollars into Idaho. These are tax dollars that we are already paying for through our federal taxes each year. Voting yes for Medicaid expansion would bring back those tax dollars. It would result in net savings for the Idaho economy and create up to 12,000 new jobs for Idaho. So the bottom line is that Medicaid expansion is the morally compassionate thing to do, and also the fiscally responsible thing to do."

The Reclaim Idaho team recently joined forces with another group, Idahoans for Healthcare. With that, Mayville said the Idaho business community and the medical community came together, with legislators from both sides of the political spectrum expressing support of the initiative.

"As we continue to go around the state, we see support growing and growing among voters, so it's going really well," he said.

Mayville said it was important to the Reclaim Idaho team to kick off the 20-day tour in Sandpoint, as it is where it all began. It was the first Sandpoint volunteers, the ones who helped with the LPOSD levy campaign, who became the core of the Medicaid expansion effort, he said.

"And then that cascaded across the state, town by town, to the point where we have versions of our Sandpoint team in about 20 different places across the state," he said.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.