Dr. “Andy” McGuire, Formerly in the Medicaid Privatization Business, Denies Sanders an Iowa Recount

by Scott Creighton

Dr. Andrea “Andy” McGuire, chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, has officially denied the Sanders campaign request for an evaluation of the Iowa caucus results as compared to the data published on the Microsoft vote tally software used to determine Hillary Clinton won the election by .2 of a percent. In most states a result this close would trigger an automatic recount just to be sure. McGuire has flat out refused to allow one leaving only Microsoft’s say-so as the official verdict in the matter.

The Sanders campaign is rechecking results on its own, going precinct by precinct, and is already finding inconsistencies, said Rania Batrice, a Sanders spokeswoman. The campaign seeks the math sheets or other paperwork that precinct chairs filled out and were supposed to return to the state party. They want to compare those documents to the results entered into a Microsoft app and sent to the party.

“Let’s compare notes. Let’s see if they match,” Batrice said Wednesday.

Dr. Andy McGuire, chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, dug in her heels and said no. Des Moines Register

As others have pointed out, Dr. “Andy” McGuire has no business being in a position to make that kind of decision. Not only does her car sport a license plate that reads “HRC 2016” but she was also co-chair of Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign in Iowa and has held fundraisers for Hillary in her own home.

Sanders is expected to win handily in New Hampshire. The polls are so lopsided right now in favor of him, they couldn’t possibly get away with stealing it via electronic voting machines without risking exposing their election rigging tool, so they’ll have to let this one go. And that means Bernie, if he had won Iowa, would be way out ahead of Clinton in the early stages of the race and that would put to bed the notion that he is “not electable”

In fact, during the caucus when Sanders was ahead, the pundits were already talking about when Hillary should get out of the race since he was expected to win New Hampshire. It’s no small thing, Hillary pulling out the ‘win’ in Iowa.

That said, should someone like Dr. McGuire be in a position to deny the Sanders campaign access to the hard copies of the voting tallies from the caucus? Obviously not. She’s effectively still on the Clinton campaign staff.

But there is something else at play here as well. She is ideologically opposed to Sanders’ Medicare For All policy and possibly even financially invested in keeping him from achieving it. That means she is definitely opposed to keeping us from having single payer healthcare because at one time she headed up a Medicaid privatization program in Iowa.

For “Andy” McGuire, Bernie Sanders’ revolution is the last thing she wants to see take shape in this country and therefore, helping Microsoft steal the Iowa caucus for her neoliberal candidate doesn’t seem like much of a stretch of the imagination.

In Iowa, as is the case in many other states since Obamacare came along, the push to finally privatize Medicare and Medicaid is underway.

On August 17, 2015, Iowa’s Governor Branstad passed his Medicaid Modernization initiative which is code for “privatization”

Three companies won the contracts to take over the last vestiges of Medicaid healthcare for Iowa’s poor, disabled and elderly populations. It was supposed to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2016, but there has been some push-back against the free market ideology plan in the Iowa senate from the democrats and it’s been postponed for a couple months.

Iowa Senate Democrats say they will approve a bill next week to repeal Gov. Terry Branstad’s plan to privatize Iowa’s Medicaid program. However, House Republicans are signaling that the measure will be dead on arrival when they receive it.

Senate Study Bill 3081, known as the “Health Care Protection Act,” would immediately give termination notices to three private managed care companies. Secondly, it would direct the Iowa Department of Human Services to continue previous efforts to improve patient outcomes, increase access to care, and to continue to make the public management of Medicaid more efficient.” Des Moines Register

Chances are likely this effort will be defeated. The republicans in the House in Iowa will kill it and if they don’t the governor will certainly veto it. Unfortunately the privatization trickle is turning into a tidal wave and it seems there’s very little we can do to stop it especially when you consider the fact that phony leftists have embedded themselves in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

Dr. Andrea “Andy” McGuire left her job to head up the Iowa Democratic Party back in March of 2015.

She had been of COO of Meridian Health Plan Iowa.

Meridian is a company that specializes in public/private partnerships centering on Medicare, Medicaid and various children’s healthcare programs. They started in Michigan.

On April 13th, 2012, Meridian announced they were expanding their privatization operations into Iowa. They hired Dr. Andrea “Andy” McGuire to head up the program. She took them from 0 to over 50,000 customers of their privatized Medicaid scam operation.

The plan was launched Feb. 1 in Muscatine County, where it has since enrolled about 1,000 members. It plans to roll out services on a county-by-county basis to serve the entire state. The plan, which specializes in serving Medicaid enrollees in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, will likely begin serving Central Iowa by the end of this year, McGuire said. Though other private plans have offered Medicaid services in the past, Meridian has the distinction of being the only private Medicaid HMO plan currently operating in Iowa. Medicaid members may opt to enroll in Meridian’s plan as an alternative to the MediPASS program, a primary care case-management system operated by Iowa Medicaid. Iowa Medicaid pays Meridian a monthly fee for each enrollee. Business Record

Essentially, Dr. McGuire was THE Medicaid privatization advocate in Iowa for a long time. After Obamacare went through, the plan was to hastily privatize as much of the socialized medical care institutions as they could on a state-by-state basis.

When she left Meridian to head up the Iowa Democratic Party, McGuire left in good standing with the company and it’s owners. Like what we see in Washington, she was off through the revolving door, sliding from private industry to public service in order to service her former private industry.

How much she did to help influence fellow Iowa Dems in the state House and Senate to get the “modernization” plan passed last year remains to be seen. But one thing is sure, she’s doing her part to squash Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” revolution. Killing in the cradle you might say.

Back in early 2015 when she was first selected to head the IDP, someone asked this question:

“Could McGuire be banking on Mrs. Clinton, because if she wins, McGuire might be on the short list to be Secretary of Health and Human Services? ” Caffeinated Thoughts

Me? I wonder if she received stock options while heading up Meridian or as part of her severance package. Would Meridian be bought out by the 3 companies taking over the privatization of Medicaid in Iowa or would they manage to remain as a managed care company? And of course, would that directly benefit the woman who just denied the Sanders campaign a chance to review the hard data from the Iowa caucus?

Yes, she has a license plate that reads “HRC 2016” and yes, she served as Hillary’s campaign chairwoman in Iowa back in 2008.

But more importantly, she’s a former chief medical officer for American Republic Insurance and a former COO of a company that produces profits from privatizing Medicare and Medicaid in Iowa.  And she may actually still own stock in that company at a time when the neoliberal vulture capitalists are circling the corpse of those two socialist programs in that state.

She has no business having anything to do with a decision to keep the Bernie Sanders campaign from seeing the hard data on the caucus results. The fact that she denied them their rightful access to the numbers shows she is still in the pockets of those insurance companies and privateers.

She has to hate what Bernie Sanders stands for considering the fact that she made a bunch of money for three years skimming off the top of Medicaid and Medicare, taking advantage of the poorest and weakest citizens of Iowa.

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