He's All In

Well the states worst kept political secret is a secret no more.  State Senator Dan Liljenquist is running for US Senate.

Former Utah state Sen. Dan Liljenquist will challenge Sen. Orrin Hatch for the Republican nomination in next year’s Senate race.

“Washington, D.C., is broken and some of our own Republican lawmakers share in the blame,” Liljenquist said in a statement. “It’s time for new conservative ideas from those who have the energy to see them through.

Earlier, I wrote about the reasons why Utah primary voters should consider voting for Dan.

So today, I thought I would give a few reasons why State Senator Dan Liljenquist would be a great choice for US Senate and honestly it can be summed up in two words - Medicaid reform.  Sen Dan has been one of the leading lights on the state level when it comes to reforming Medicaid so that it is available for generations to come.

So maybe ending epidurals for Medicaid patients wasn't the best idea, but Sen. Dan Liljenquist thinks he's got one that will bring health care costs under control for the state.

The Bountiful Republican has been tasked with keeping Medicaid costs from overwhelming the state budget over the next 10 years. Currently it accounts for roughly 18 percent of the total budget. Unchecked, it will be nearly half the state budget in 2020.

His latest idea is to remove the fee system used by the state and instead come up with a single cost per Medicaid patient that the state would pay providers. That would accomplish several things:

• Providers would have a much more difficult time gaming the system. They wouldn't be able to attach fees that aren't necessary, saving the state money on the front end.

• Because there is a set cost, that would theoretically force providers to look at their own procedures to find cost savings.

• While Liljenquist knows the burden would be put on the providers to find cost cuts, the state would be eliminating the bureaucracy-heavy fee system -- likely saving hospital costs right off the bat.

Entitlement reform has long been the proverbial "3rd rail" in American politics and saying that most politicians in DC are afraid to touch it is a gross understatement. Senator Dan has not only been willing to touch Medicaid reform - he also took onstate pension reform

Last year, Utah switched from defined benefit to defined contribution pension for its public employees after State Senator Dan Liljenquist determined their public pensions were nearing insolvency and spearheaded pension reform. A defined benefit plan is what California public employees have now. It specifies the amount of monthly benefits upon retirement. Investments made by the pension fund are assumed to be able to keep up with the amount owed, even though this clearly has not happened in reality. By contrast, a defined contribution plan specifies how much the employee and employer will contribute. The amount of future benefits is not guaranteed. However, employees control their own plan, can invest it however they want, can take it with them if they leave, and crucially perhaps, the state cannot attempt to loot it to pay for current obligations.

Sen. Liljenquist has been a legislative innovator.

Liljenquist, who recently received the "Legislative Entrepreneur of the Year Award" from the conservative group Freedomworks, is willing to put a sharp edge on the apparently positive gloss on Hatch's career. "He's certainly an institution, but there's a whole new generation of people getting involved in politics who are saying, 'where have our leaders been, how did we get here, and who is going to get us out of it?'"

Congress has "driven more and more decisions away from Utah and to the federal government -- from 1979 when Sen. Hatch and others voted to establish the federal Department of Education -- to as recently as this decade, with the massive expansion of entitlement programs."

Liljenquist even laid the aspects of Obamacare most detested by the Tea Party at Hatch's door. "It was this generation of politicians, Republicans and Democrats, that laid out the constitutional argument for individual mandates in the early 90s," he said, "As states, we deal with the aftermath of these decisions, and in many ways we're being blackmailed with our own money."

One of the things that many voters I talk to (in day to day life) are looking for is new ideas...innovation...the ability to think outside of the box.  Someone who will bring ideas and solutions to the table and who will not just continue with the broken status quo of DC.  For those folks, I would highly recommend that they look at Dan Liljenquist for US Senate.