Sondra Stein: Cooper wants to help poor with health care

Regarding the Jan. 5 news article “Cooper’s Medicaid expansion sparks fight with lawmakers”: Gov. Roy Cooper has already redeemed my vote. He promised to govern in the best interests of all the people and already has acted on two critical issues that effect the health and well being of our people and our state that former Gov. Pat McCrory refused to act on: HB2 and Medicaid expansion.

I was so proud of his effort to bring key players together to repeal HB2 even before he took office. Unfortunately, the General Assembly chose stalemate over acting in the people’s best interest.

Hopefully, the GA will not fight the governor’s action to expand Medicaid and bring access to health care to nearly 500,000 working poor North Carolinians.

As U.S. Rep. Mark Meadow (R-NC) said, “health care is not just policy. It’s people’s lives.” The GA’s failure to act on this in the past three years has cost the health and the lives of thousands of North Carolinians, driven rural hospitals into bankruptcy and cost the state thousands of health care jobs that would bring full employment in living wage jobs back to every community in North Carolina, because every community will have a hospital or health center.

That’s the kind of policy leadership North Carolina needs.

This story was originally published January 6, 2017 at 5:20 PM with the headline "Sondra Stein: Cooper wants to help poor with health care."