Don’t let Cuomo push through another Maximus extension
One massive government contractor has been treated extremely well by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And it could happen again in this year’s state budget.
From Cuomo’s first year in power, he has used his leverage in the state budget process to enforce a strict cap on the growth of Medicaid and make deep cuts to the program despite the growing number of people enrolled. Millions depend on Medicaid for their health care, including lowincome families, frail elderly, people with disabilities, and people who’ve lost jobs from the COVID-19 recession. Our doctors, nurses, hospitals, home care providers and nursing homes need sustainable Medicaid payments to care for New Yorkers. Many of the hospitals that struggled most to respond to COVID-19 have been hardest hit by Medicaid cuts. (You might never be on Medicaid, but if you’re ever in a hospital that has lost money because of Medicaid cuts, the care you get will be stretched thinner.)
But while New York has been cutting Medicaid payments to health care providers and restricting services, we’re shoveling billions of dollars to a huge, littleknown company called Maximus.
Those contracts have been granted, renewed, and expanded, over and over, without competitive bidding, and with none of the oversight state contracts typically receive.
Maximus administers social service programs for most states. In New York, it operates a laundry list of programs for the De
mats, Chinese officials made it quite clear that they no longer fear our criticism, because they don’t respect us as they once did, and they don’t think the rest of the world does, either. Or as Yang Jiechi, China’s top foreign affairs policymaker, baldly told his U.S. counterparts: “The United States does not have the qualification … to speak to China from a position of strength.”
Surprised? What did you think, that the Chinese didn’t notice that our last president inspired his followers to ransack our Capitol; that a majority of his party did not recognize the results of our democratic election; that a member of our Congress believes that Jewish-run space lasers cause forest fires; that left-wing anarchists were allowed to take over a section of downtown Portland; that gun violence in America is out control? You think they didn’t notice? Which brings me to the 2025 Olympics. Oh, you haven’t heard of the 2025 Olympics? Well, they are on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s calendar. Xi unilaterally declared the 2025 Olympics in 2015 and suggested that there would be only two competitors: China and America. It was an initiative that Xi’s government called “Made in China 2025.”
It was a 10-year plan to modernize China’s manufacturing base by massively investing government resources to dominate what Xi defined as the 10 key hightech industries of the 21st century: artificial intelligence; electric cars and other new-energy vehicles; 5G telecommunications; robotics; agricultural technologies; aerospace and maritime engineering; synthetic materials; and biomedicine.
And just a few weeks ago, when China issued its 14th five-year plan, to run through 2025, Xi basically doubled down on his government’s investment in “innovation-driven development.” Message to America: We will try to beat you at your own game so we will never, ever again be dependent on you for high-tech goods.
My message to my fellow Americans is: We now have to return to and commit even more to what was our formula for success. And that is: educating our workforce up to and beyond whatever technology demands; building the world’s best infrastructure of ports, roads and telecommunications; attracting the world’s most energetic and high-iq immigrants to enrich our universities and start new businesses; legislating the best regulations to incentivize risk-taking while curbing recklessness; and steadily increasing government-funded research to push out the boundaries of science so our entrepreneurs can turn the most promising new ideas into startups.
Nothing could be more important. Because good ideas — respect for human rights, democracy, an independent judiciary, free markets, protection for minorities — don’t just win in the world because they are good ideas. They diffuse and are embraced because others see them producing justice, power, wealth, opportunity and stability in countries that practice them.