Edit: Ottercare isn’t guv’s final answer

In this morning’s editorial, Opinion Editor Marty Trillhaase of the Lewiston Tribune comments:

In last week’s oped, Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter made three points about his Primary Care Access Plan:

• Medicaid expansion, it is not. Accepting Obamacare’s offer to extend coverage to 78,000 working poor Idaho adults who can’t afford even subsidized private insurance would deliver something close to $280 million of health care services. For the first three years of the program, the feds would pay 100 percent of the costs but never less than 90 percent thereafter.

PCAP - dubbed Ottercare critics on the right and left - would lend about $30 million of coverage from state taxpayers. It would provide primary health care, but unlike Medicaid, precious little for prescriptions, follow-up laboratory work, procedures or hospitalization. Either people won’t get the care they need or someone else will pay for it. But Obamacare is anathema to many Idaho Republican lawmakers. More here.

Question: Does Gov. Otter have the will or the inclination to do right by Idaho’s poor and expand Medicaid, despite the entrenched opposition of ideological GOP legislators?