STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

A couple months ago Luke Mayville refurbished a 1977 Dodge camper, painting it bright green and emblazoning the words “Medicaid for Idaho” across the top.

Then he drove it to 20 Idaho counties, including Blaine County, to rally support for putting an initiative on the ballot that would expand affordable healthcare for Idahoans.

The idea, Mayville said, was to treat the issue as if it were a candidate.

Mayville paraded that “candidate” before Blaine County Democrats Friday night at their Winter Gala held at the Ketchum Events Center.

Nineteen states, including Idaho, have rejected federal money for Medicaid expansion, leaving nearly 2.5 million people uninsured.

The $600 million of federal money that Idaho would get each year would have created 14,000 jobs and provided health care for 78,000 Idahoans that can’t get health care because they make too little to afford their own but make too much to qualify for Medicaid, said Mayville.

“The State of Maine recently became the first state to expand Medicaid eligibility through a ballot initiative,” the co-founder of the grassroots organization Reclaim Idaho told those gathered at the gala. “I and others are trying to make Idaho the second state to do that.”

The Medicaid for Idaho campaign began not in Boise but in Sandpoint where Sandpoint native and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson gave a powerful speech touting the need for better education in the Gem State and others touted the need for affordable health care.

Mayville said he was told not to take his campaign to Idaho’s panhandle.

“Not only did they not not like us but several hundred donated money to our campaign,” he said.

Mayville, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Center for American Studies at Columbia University, recently wrote the book, “John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy.”

The book tells how long before “the one percent” became a protest slogan, American founding father John Adams feared the power of a class he called simply “the few”—the wellborn, the beautiful and the rich.

Adams believed wealth not only buys influence but causes citizens to vote for and with the rich because they esteem the rich and submit to their wishes. Adams’ fears have a cautionary bent to them today because of the way inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite, Mayville said.

To effect change, Mayville said, Americans have to change the way they talk about government.

To illustrate, he told of a single mother of four who has a job as a teacher and another as a hairdresser but still can’t afford to buy health insurance for her family.

”How can they call me a moocher? I have two jobs!” she exclaimed. “Every day I pray for a solution. Every day I pray that the pain will go away.”

“I think that kind of story should be at the heart of any political agenda we have,” he said. “But she’s not part of a whole host of legislators’ agendas. What is their agenda?”

Many of those legislators say it’s all about local control and fiscal responsibility, he said. But, if it’s about local control, why are they reluctant to allow communities to decide for themselves whether to raise the minimum wage? If it’s about fiscal responsibility, why do we have a trillion dollar deficit?

“What it’s really about is government being an instrument of wealth and the well-connected,” he said, noting how one of Idaho’s U.S. senators had voted to cut his own family’s taxes by $4 million while one in four people in Grangeville go without health insurance.

“We have a chance to put together a simple agenda: Government for the people,” he said.

Government for the people was exercised during the 1930s when elderly people in this country were dying of starvation, he noted. It became known as Social Security.

Mayville said one of the greatest champions of government for the people was also one of the greatest Republicans who ever lived—Abraham Lincoln.

One of Idaho’s greatest statesmen started out as a 28-year-old Orofino logger and Korean War vet who just wanted to send his daughters to kindergarten, Mayville added. When he was rebuffed, he decided to run for office.

Cecil Andrus went on to serve as Idaho’s longest serving governors, serving four terms in the governor’s office and four terms in the Idaho Senate. He saved Castle Peak in the mountains north of Sun Valley from mining and established the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area. And he engineered public-land protections for a quarter of Alaska as Secretary of the Interior.

“That’s what we talk about when we talk about government for the people,” he said.

DID  YOU KNOW?

On Friday Gov. Butch Otter and Lt. Gov. Brad Little signed an executive order they said would give the State Department of Insurance the authority to seek out and offer plans for Idahoans without health coverage. There are no details yet on how that would work.