5 days Ago
By all accounts, Robbie Kerr did an excellent job leading the state’s Medicaid agency. There were those claims, which led to implicit death threats against state election officials, that he was helping non-citizens register to vote, but they were completely fabricated by the charlatans in the so-called House Freedom Caucus who figured out they could generate social media clicks by either showing off their astounding ignorance or else misleading the public. Mr.
Kerr did such a good job, in fact, that Gov. Henry McMaster tapped him to take on tasks outside his portfolio as director of the Department of Health and Human Services, most notably devising a plan to overhaul the state’s school-based mental health services after the pandemic. One of the most impressive things he did was work with Marsha Adams, director of the state Department of Administration, to develop a plan to merge the siloed, uncommunicative and often duplicative departments of Public Health, Aging, Mental Health, Disabilities and Special Needs, Health and Human Services and Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services — and sell that plan to just about every member of the Legislature.
Editorial: SC is spending $34M on an agency split that won't improve our health Among the reasons so many people were willing to go along with it was that Mr. Kerr was expected to lead the new agency — and he had the well-earned respect and gravitas to overcome the historic resistance in our Legislature to any kind of structural changes to state agencies that make sense. Unfortunately, those same members of the Freedom Caucus who slandered him and provoked death threats with their lies about illegal voter registrations were able to capitalize on legislative leaders’ gamesmanship and foot-dragging to scuttle the plan in the final minutes of this year’s legislative session.
Even more unfortunately, Mr. Kerr has decided to retire (a second time, actually; Mr. McMaster had convinced him to come out of retirement to run the agency again in 2021).
Scoppe: Senate leaders' bill would prove me wrong. Will their colleagues bite? Earlier this month, Mr. McMaster announced that he had tapped Mr.
Kerr’s chief of staff to succeed him. We don’t know Eunice Medina, but we know that DHHS is a well-run agency that has not faced problems, and we know that Mr. Kerr recruited her to the job three years ago.
Given that, we applaud Mr. McMaster’s decision to reject the trendy practice of hiring a consulting firm — usually from away — to conduct a nationwide search to fill a state or local job, with the result that we spend a lot of money to hire someone who knows nothing about our state and often is no more capable than people already working at the agency, who too often decide to leave the agency they were rejected to lead. Looking outside makes a lot of sense for a troubled or moribund agency that has become too stuck in its old ways.
But when an agency has been doing a good job, there ought to be a top deputy who is prepared to take over and continue that job. Lacking any reason to suspect otherwise, that’s who we should promote — particularly since state law now allows the governor to fire many agency directors who don’t work out, or about whom he simply changes his mind. Editorial: It was the SC Freedom Caucus' biggest disruption.
It needs to be reversed. But while there's reason to believe that Ms. Medina will be up to the job, we don’t have reason to believe she’ll be able to lend the significant weight Mr.
Kerr could to efforts to make some sense out of South Carolina’s jumbled mess of health-related agencies. Of course, we shouldn’t need a lot of weight added, given as how a very smart plan has been written and the House leadership, Senate leadership and all but 16 of the 170 lawmakers supported that plan earlier this year. While chief negotiator Sen.
Tom Davis assures us it’s at the top of his agenda for the 2025 legislative session, it was notably absent from the House GOP leaders’ list of priorities , and it wasn’t among the items Senate Republican Leader Shane Massey predicted his caucus would focus on. In both cases, it needs to be. Editorial: Before the great SC bar fight resumes, let's recall what's at stake House leaders should recall that the disrupters who call themselves the Freedom Caucus thought they were going to double their numbers this year, based in no small part on their opposition to a wholly fabricated description of the consolidation, and instead they might have picked up one seat, and maybe not even that.
And Senate leaders should recall that the number of opponents in that chamber was significantly smaller and they were willing to let the legislation become law. Also, the Senate Republicans who lost their primary bids did so primarily because of abortion, not because of a sensible, nonpartisan rearrangement of state agencies that would have made them far more accountable than they are today. And everybody needs to recall that South Carolina’s alphabet soup of health agencies is giving us a lower quality of care from top-heavy bureaucracies, and that doesn’t serve anybody except maybe all those extra people who get to run a state agency like their individual fiefdom rather than working together to provide smart, coordinated care with our tax dollars.
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