By Brian Parsons | Originally published at withdrawconsent.org
I‘m alive! I want to express sincere gratitude to those who cared enough to read my rantings and then proclaim their concern for me, having not seen my posts and articles for some time. From friends to state GOP events to my wife’s patient parents, many have expressed their concern about my absence from the newspapers. It is good to be appreciated. Many have heard by now, but my hiatus stems from a preference to get up from the desk and not stare at a computer screen, and avoiding the resulting health detriments. I’m still full of opinions, but I’m mainly exercising them in action these days. Where to start?
My oldest son aged out of Summer Camp this year, and so for the first Summer in a while, I’m playing full-time dad. Unfortunately, hobbies like writing take a backseat to being dad, but we’re working on tackling some new hobbies and responsibilities together.
Locally, I continue to serve in a leadership role with the Bannock County Republican Party. We have been working diligently to build a party that is responsive to the voters and inclusive of the grassroots. In the past year, we have transferred the hosting of the county website to the state party so that they can absorb the costs associated with having a website and save local conservatives the cost. We integrated a digital donation platform to handle fundraising in a modern and convenient fashion while also taking care of FEC reporting for us. We entered floats into local parades, though we declined the Independence Day parade in Pocatello a few weeks ago when much of our help was requested on campaign floats elsewhere. We hope to make up for it at ISU Homecoming or the Pocatello Christmas parade.
Together, we worked hard last year and defeated Proposition 1: Ranked Choice Voting by a 70:30 margin statewide. We re-elected Donald Trump and sent a Republican to the state house from District 29B for the first time in a long time. In April, we hosted a Lincoln Day Dinner featuring former Trump Administration official and Idaho Solicitor General Theo Wold, raising a record amount of funds to help elect good conservatives in Bannock County. In June, the Bannock County Republican Party hosted the entirety of the Idaho State GOP in Pocatello for its annual Summer Meeting. The Bannock County Republican Party is being recognized for its recent progress.
Despite recent national drama around the Department of Justice and the Jeffrey Epstein case, I remain committed to seeing President Trump’s vision accomplished. His Big Beautiful Bill codified 28 of his executive orders, which were desperately needed given the speed with which Joe Biden erased progress after the first Trump Administration. I am not thrilled about taking up the foreign projects of holdout legislators, like continued aid to Ukraine or Israel for unending warfare. This past week, I saw that for the first time in nearly 20 years, the United States ran a budget surplus in June. Despite the naysayers, President Trump and Scott Bessent’s tariff negotiations appear to be working.
So, what am I currently working on? In the past year, I authored and passed Idaho Republican Party Resolution 2025-10, which urged the Idaho Legislature to take steps to support rural and private practice healthcare clinics that are under extreme pressure from corporate and hospital medicine. Being the spouse of a local private practice physician, I’m highly concerned about the consolidation and corporatization of our healthcare system. While the Liberal press blames the closure of Idaho healthcare clinics on our conservative family-first policies, like protecting the unborn, a deeper dive tells the real story about the heavy hand of government regulation and deep pockets of corporations stifling competition in healthcare. More often than not, our challenges with maintaining rural practices are financial and not philosophical.
On March 19, Governor Little signed Idaho House Bill 345, which is an overhaul of Idaho’s Medicaid system. The system desperately needs to be overhauled because our participation rate is double that of neighboring states like Utah. Fully forty percent of Idaho’s children are on Medicaid. This is not indicative of a family-friendly state when such a high percentage of our kids live below the poverty line. Rather than putting everyone on public subsidies, what are we doing instead to improve the conditions that leave our kids in such a state?
A few months ago, I published an article on the bait and switch that is HB345. Having now surveyed the damage, I am working on authoring an amendment to HB345 that will restore a crucial program that was quite possibly eliminated erroneously. The Healthy Connections Primary Care Case Management program is a Medicaid program that was established in 1993 to reduce over-utilization and costs in Primary Care by placing the onus on primary care to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital. Idaho House Bill 345 will place this responsibility on a Managed Care Organization such as United Healthcare or SelectHealth, but Idaho Medicaid doesn’t expect this transition to happen until 2029.
In the meantime, Healthy Connections will terminate on January 01, 2026, and the infrastructure put in place for the last 30 years to do this work will go unfunded without any of the guardrails that the Healthy Connections program provides. In a nutshell, doctors will no longer be doing the work of managing Medicaid patients and ensuring medical necessity. Medicaid patients will have an all-you-can eat buffet of healthcare on the taxpayer dime, and costs will skyrocket. Primary care will take a huge hit in the funding to manage these patients, which is detrimental to a Primary Care infrastructure in Idaho that is already on life support. Idaho ranks dead last among the fifty two states and territories for physicians per capita. I hope to work with the legislature when they convene in January to resolve this issue.
About Brian Parsons
Brian Parsons has been a resident of Pocatello for 10 years. He is a locally and nationally published columnist and the current vice chair of the Bannock County Republican Party. He’s a proud husband and father, and an unabashed paleoconservative. You can follow him on his blog at WithdrawConsent.org.
