Pardue extensively quoted state officials, including Republican Governor Haley’s social services director, Tony Keck, arguing against the expansion of Medicaid. The stories also exposed the desperate need for improved healthcare and the obvious solution: “Take the federal government up on its offer to extend Medicaid to the uninsured.”
Under the banner “ Forgotten South Carolina: A Legacy of Shame, A Blueprint for the Future,” Pardue published a major series about the rural counties whose third-world conditions drag the state’s rankings to “the bottom of nearly every list you want it to be at the top of.” The “lack of significant state investment in the basic building blocks of its society-health, education, and economic opportunity-remains a key reason why South Carolina can’t shake the sorry legacies of its past, and why so many of its residents remain trapped in ignorance, sickness and poverty,” he concluded in a video that accompanied the series online. The way South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley tells it, what her state needs is more tax cuts and what it doesn’t need is the “public policy nightmare and fiscal disaster that is ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.”īut to Charleston Post and Courier reporter Doug Pardue, who has spent more than 15 years reporting in South Carolina, including eight months on an in-depth exploration of the state’s profound inequities, the facts say otherwise: Progress in the state can’t come without more tax dollars, and rejecting federal money to expand Medicaid effectively denies easier, cheaper healthcare access to about 500,000 South Carolinians, most of whom are black and poor.
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