Journalists’ Roundtable: Medicaid concerns and more

It’s Friday, which means it is time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. This week, “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons was joined by Jim Small of “Arizona Mirror,” Mark Brodie of “KJZZ” and Laurie Roberts of “AZCentral.com and Arizona Republic.”

Top stories this week include

• Schweikert dismisses Medicaid concerns
• DOE pulls back ESA data
• Voucher fraud conviction
• AZ Sex-Ed money threatened
• AG wants Trump to return DEA agents
• Wadsack misses court date

Schweikert dismisses Medicaid concerns:

Jim Small: “…it basically dismisses all of the concerning and complaints about the very large cuts to medicaid that Republicans and President Donald Trump enacted over the summer…you’re approaching 20-25% of the state’s kind of medicaid roles…getting removed because of the changes that Republicans made in order to fill these tax cuts for the next decade.”

Mark Brodie: “…there are a lot of concerns as you might imagine…a lot of those concerns are from hospitals, especially in rural parts of the state…some of those hospitals are really concerned about shutting down because they’re not gonna have enough money, they’re gonna have to close particular departments that maybe don’t make enough money.”

Laurie Roberts: “…well those people once they do finally get sick and they have to show up at the emergency room somebody’s gotta pay for that.”

DOE pulls back ESA data:

Mark Brodie: “A media outlet had asked for this information, and the Education Department sent it, and apparently didn’t realize that as part of all the data included identifiable information for some of the families who receive ESAs, basically school vouchers…which is not something you should be sending out to media organizations, that stuff is supposed to be private.”

Laurie Roberts: “It sounds like it was a very small number of people and it was an inadvertent error…we’re human beings, sometimes people make errors.”