The New Utah Medicaid Expansion Law Was Basically The Same as a Bill Seen in Even Last Year’s Utah Legislative Session. Here’s What The Bill’s Sponsor Had to Say About That.

In the last handful of years, including last year, Utah Rep. Robert Spendlove (R-Sandy) has run Medicaid-expansion bills that his overwhelmingly colleagues have shot down. Then this legislative session, spurred by Utah voters, the overwhelmingly Republican Utah legislature made SB96, less Medicaid expansion, law. (Utahns, through Proposition 3, made Medicaid expansion state statute at the ballot box.) That means that they made statute out of a bill that Spendlove had put in front of them multiple times. Spendlove said that his bills, including the Trump-supported HB472 last session, wasn’t rejected, however.

“They just didn’t respond, essentially,” Spendlove said.

Why is that?

“The reason they didn’t respond is because they were waiting for the election,” Spendlove told Beehive Blunders. “In fact, they essentially encouraged us to do what we did and take my bill from last year and re-submit it.”

SB96 and Spendlove’s bills expanded Medicaid for folks making up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level, Spendlove said.

While Spendlove voted for SB96, he said, “we could have done better.”

“But you know, I mean, nothing’s perfect. The proposition wasn’t perfect and the bill’s not perfect,” Spendlove…