Firstly, Kathie is on the road and fighting off some wildfire smoke in Chicago, which set the tone for a conversation about just how bad conditions got in the Midwest last week.

Then it was on to the big events: Democrats’ Liberty and Justice dinner drew Pete Buttigieg and, by Laura’s read, a noticeably more energized crowd than in 2025. Rita Hart’s talk of two dozen-plus field offices and 65 hired field organizers (many former Rob Sand campaign staffers) suggests Democrats are finally taking a real statewide ground game seriously, something we debated the roots of going all the way back to Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.

On the other side, the Family Leadership Summit brought Kim Reynolds, Zach Lahn, Ashley Hinson, and Speaker Mike Johnson to Des Moines. Johnson’s speech leaned hard into warnings about socialism and communism taking over Washington, a rhetorical strategy Laura, who’s actually lived in post-communist Czech Republic and studied in the Soviet Union, called out as more base-rallying than accurate.

We also got into Attorney General Brenna Bird’s new Medicaid Fraud Elimination Task Force, with Kathie raising concerns that “fraud prevention” efforts often turn into red tape that hurts people who legitimately qualify for services, and Laura noting the task force isn’t looking at the flip side: people being wrongly denied home-based care.

We closed with a fun bit of trivia from Laura on Steve King’s surprising 2010 role, plus one of Dave’s stranger childhood stories (you’ll have to listen for that one).

Want to sharpen your writing and get the inside scoop on Iowa politics at the same time? Join us September 27-30 at the Okoboji Writers' & Songwriters' Retreat on beautiful West Lake Okoboji, featuring Iowa Down Ballot analysts Laura Belin and Kathie Obradovich. They'll walk you through finding public information, getting your opinion pieces published, and plenty more. Spots are limited, so scan the QR code at the beginning and end of the video or head to okobojiwritersretreat.com to sign up. If you’d like to make a donation to help the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative which supports this show please click the button below. Thanks!

Auto-generated transcript below:

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Dave Price: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Iowa Down Ballot Podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by Laura Belin and Kathie Obradovich.

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Dave Price: on a Saturday, back-to-back weeks, we are testing the flexibility of these to find journalists, because we’re trying to… we’ve had too much stuff happening on Friday, so…

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Dave Price: So we’ll be dropping this on Sunday, and for those of you who consume at different times, you’re like, what the heck are you talking about, dude? But, we really wanted to work some stuff in for Friday. So, let me start as we begin on this Saturday morning with, good morning, how are you both?

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Kathie Obradovich: Good. I’m going to apologize in advance. I’m a little froggy this morning, so I’m going to try not to cough in your ears, but a little bit, a little. I had a cold and then went and spent a couple days in the Chicago smoke or Canada smoke in Chicago, maybe so.

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Dave Price: Yeah, how bad, I mean, clearly we’ve seen national stories on that. How bad is that?

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Kathie Obradovich: It’s bad. It’s really bad. I mean, so we were in the Chicago suburbs, southwest suburbs and you know, clearly, literally a haze just over everything. And you know, it’s not too bad going in from an air conditioned car to an air conditioned building, et cetera. But, and I do too much of that and my eyes were starting to burn and yeah, it’s, it is not good. Some other

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Kathie Obradovich: friends of ours were going to go up to northern Minnesota and came back a day early, because it’s just, you know, literally in the red zone. One day that we were there, both Chicago and Detroit were claiming to have the worst air quality in the entire world.

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Dave Price: I heard a story on the radio.

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Dave Price: Yeah, Friday morning, I think it was. And, the report was that it’s so thick and bad that even if you don’t generally have any kind of respiratory issues, it’s still not a good idea to be outside.

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Dave Price: Yeah. Like, it’s seriously at that level.

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Kathie Obradovich: I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time outside. My nephew was supposed to play a softball game on Thursday night, that got canceled, so there was a lot of outdoor activities being canceled, all around the Chicago metro, so…

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Dave Price: Speaking of activities, we’ve had a bunch of kind of high profile ones. The Democrats on Sunday had their Liberty and Justice dinner. The Republicans the Friday before, so a little bit more than a week ago, had the annual Lincoln dinner, and then the family leader had the annual Family Leadership Summit. We had all of those kind of jammed one after another, but we had a couple of

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Dave Price: IPs, Headlining it for the Democrats, you had Pete Buttigieg

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Dave Price: which his thing was Sunday, so we didn’t really get to talk about this, but

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Dave Price: I thought it was interesting that early on in his remarks before the group he made a little comment about the 2020 Democratic caucuses, and how they’re still waiting on some of the results from a few of the precincts, you know, and I think for the most part, I think people laughed. If Troy Price, the former chair of the party, was watching online, he’s probably like

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Dave Price: But, and then Buttigieg was asked about it in the gaggle afterwards with reporters and, you know, has he let bygones be bygones or whatever? And I forget, he kind of playfully handled the question. But Laura, I saw you in the, obviously we were both there at Prairie Meadows when they had this thing.

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Dave Price: what’d you think about…

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Dave Price: I’m always curious about, like, who’s in the audience, you know what I mean? So this is, like, a late afternoon event on a Sunday. It was an older crowd, I felt like. A decent amount of empty seats, and I don’t know if that matters or not matters. People probably bought tickets and then didn’t show.

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Laura Belin: They set it up for more people.

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Laura Belin: There were definitely more people attending than the last few years, but because they’d set up the room in rows instead of having tables with chairs around it.

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Dave Price: Mhmm.

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Laura Belin: It ended up looking like there were some empty seats, but…

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Laura Belin: I would describe the crowd as kind of the usual suspects. I mean, I saw a lot of people who are activists in certain counties, and they’ve been involved for a long time, or they’re involved in county Democratic leadership. But I was really struck by the upbeat mood in the crowd. I mean, in twenty twenty five, when I was around at Democratic events, I mean, Democrats were just struggling to pick themselves up off the floor, basically.

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Laura Belin: And I think that people feel very…

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Laura Belin: They feel like they have a strong chance to win some of these races. Rita Hart talked about the ground game that the party is building, that they already have more than two dozen field offices open. And I talked to some people from different counties who said, oh, yeah, they have there’s an office and people are out every weekend. They have volunteers out knocking on doors. I mean, we haven’t seen anything like that level of ground game since Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in twenty twelve.

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Laura Belin: On the Democratic side.

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Dave Price: And I think, are you the one who asked Rita about that in the gaggle?

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Laura Belin: after the.

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Dave Price: Yes. About the organizational side, and you know, you’re the, you’re one of the few nerdy types that really looks into that kind of deep level stuff, but it, and that doesn’t get a lot of reportage statewide, I don’t think, because it’s sort of inside baseball so much, but as you know.

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Dave Price: That could reflect a number of things, right? Enthusiasm.

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Dave Price: greater fundraising, and then maybe even just a broader view of instead of isolating to a couple of pockets that some Democrats have believed they should go to kind of maximize turnout where they know they have a bunch of people. This might reflect a little more emphasis to do, maybe not truly statewide, but more of a statewide focus than they’ve done recently. Is that fair?

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Laura Belin: Definitely, and the fundraising is crucial, and I think that the largest chunk of it is coming from Rob Sand’s campaign to support this field effort, because a number of the field organizers, Rita Hart said there are about 65 field organizers who have already been hired, and a number of them were working on Rob Sand’s campaign initially, and now they’re technically working for, I guess they call it Iowa Forward, so they’re employees of the Iowa Democratic Party right now, but

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Laura Belin: They have people out everywhere. I talked with Caitlin Dre, the Democratic state senator from Sioux City, and asked her about the field office that’s open there. And she’s focused on her own race and knocking her own doors. But it’s gotta be helpful for candidates in all of these down ballot races all over the state to have volunteers out there. They’re targeting, they’re IDing supporters. And at this point, they’re also doing a lot of volunteering.

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Laura Belin: recruitment for the people who can help later in September and October, when the broader public is tuning in.

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Dave Price: I talked to a Republican activist who heard that figure of 65 and was part of a meeting.

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Dave Price: and said they addressed that, and were concerned about the resources that SAND is bringing to the party, and this is only by one person’s account of this, so take that for what it is. It’s more, maybe, anecdotal than empirical, but…

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Dave Price: that he said it became part of the conversation about, hey, we may not be able to play dollar for dollar with what they’re putting together here, so we’re gonna have to get our people fired up and do the work. And Kathie, I didn’t mean to cut you off.

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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, no, that’s okay. I was just going to say, you know, candidates sometimes complain about coordinated campaigns because there’s some control issues and, you know, there can be, you know, struggles about that. But there’s no arguing about the resources that Rob Sand is bringing in and how that really extends what individual campaigns are able to do. And the Democrats have not had those resources over the past

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Kathie Obradovich: cycles. And, you know, I think that we’ll see, especially in terms of

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, getting volunteers out, doing those, knocking those doors, which is so crucial, for Democrats, that all of those things are probably, you know, if they can maintain that, without having big blowouts over egos, that that’s gonna make a big difference.

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Laura Belin: Well, and you know, I’m always, I have my low-key obsession with what I call the mid-sized cities, those micropolitan areas. And like, let’s take the first congressional district, which has the largest number of those cities between 10,000 and 30,000 people. There’s going to be, if they’re actually in most of these towns, I think there already is a coordinated campaign office. If Christina Bohannon had had

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Laura Belin: field offices in Indianola and Clinton and Burlington and Newton. I mean, you gotta believe that they would have found her an extra 800 votes that she needed in 2024. They just didn’t have anything, any organization to speak of.

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Dave Price: This, maybe this is for a deeper conversation for another show, but what.

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Dave Price: I guess I’ve been confused with the differing philosophies on this, and maybe this and I don’t. I don’t know the inner working. So maybe this just comes down to a thing about resources. But going like way way back to Howard Dean, when he was

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Dave Price: chair for Democrats, you know, he wanted this 50-state approach, and some people sort of mocked him from that, for that, you know, why waste resources in Republican red states, blah, blah, blah. And we still had that…

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Dave Price: there was that philosophy in this state as well, which I never quite understood.

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Dave Price: why you would concede so much of the state as you just keep seeing your numbers go down. And Sand, who… and I realize Republicans make fun of him for saying that he’s been campaigning for governor ever since he’d be… you know, he got elected, but…

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Dave Price: he has been all over the place, so he does the 99 county tour, I mean, he does the 100 tour, but, I mean, he’s in all these counties, he goes there, I think, every year, so he’s the Democrat going everywhere, and some of the Democrats just didn’t seem to fundamentally believe in that, so maybe he is… is it really…

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Dave Price: Is it too much to say that he gets the credit for really.

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Dave Price: kind of making this party more statewide than it was because of his both efforts and resources? Is that too simplified?

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Laura Belin: I think there were always Democrats in Iowa who wanted the party to be doing more in some of these smaller cities and rural areas, but they just didn’t have the resources. The party had few staff, and so they didn’t… in 2022,

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Laura Belin: I mean, there was barely… I don’t even know what they did. They maybe did one absentee ballot mailing. I mean, there was hardly anything of a turnout effort for Democrats in 2022, and it really made a difference in some races. This is something I like to

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Laura Belin: tell audiences. So, of course, the governor’s race was a blowout. But the attorney general, the Democratic turnout statewide, the level was at about 60% in 2022. And if you just had 63% Democratic turnout with no persuasion at all, just, you know, just more Democrats voting, Tom Miller gets reelected. And if you have 65% Democratic turnout.

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Laura Belin: Miller and Mike Fitzgerald both get reelected. Again, with no persuasion of any swing voters at all. And those are achievable levels. In 2018, the Democratic turnout was

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Laura Belin: just under sixty eight percent. So it’s not like that’s impossible to get for a midterm, but the party just wasn’t doing anything. And I think that Rob Sand’s campaign having the resources means that that people get what they want. Now I don’t know as to Kathie’s point, it could be that we see in September and October some differences in opinion of how much is the party doing the right thing. Mhmm. Are they focusing too much on mailed ballots versus

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Laura Belin: canvassing. I mean, both Rita Hart and Rob Sand made a big deal at that event about getting out there and having face-to-face conversations with voters and listening to what their concerns are, rather than just showing up at their door with a prepared script that you’re going to read to them.

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Kathie Obradovich: I’ll just jump in and say, you know.

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Kathie Obradovich: It’s really simplistic. But, you know, we know that, you know, Democrats are not likely to win the fourth district, but to win statewide. And Rob Sand being the only Democrat who is currently elected statewide, I think he understands this. You’ve got to you’ve got to have some Democratic votes in the fourth district in order to win statewide. And the more that you have.

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Kathie Obradovich: there, you know, and ultimately, you’re not necessarily persuading a lot of Republicans to vote for you, maybe a few, but, you know, getting the people who are likely to vote for you out of their houses and actually casting those ballots is critical.

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Kathie Obradovich: And I think, you know, when it, when it comes down to priorities that those, you know, bright red counties become, you know, the lower priorities and you’re focusing on getting people turned out in the cities and there’s just not enough to win statewide if that’s all you’re doing.

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Laura Belin: Mmh.

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Dave Price: If I may selfishly make a plug, I have, for my, TV role, I have a longer form piece with some of what Pete Buttigieg said at Liberty and Justice. We also talked to him in the…

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Dave Price: in the gaggle. So he did a couple of different events, and then there was also a he did a campaign event with Sarah Trone Garriott, the 3rd District Democratic candidate. I will link to all of that on my column this weekend, and I’m doing what Laura does sometimes. If you say it out loud, that assures that you must

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Dave Price: be complete with your work by your self-imposed deadline. So just saying it out publicly will force me to

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Dave Price: to get on it and make sure I have this done this weekend. To Kathie’s point about enthusiasm and all of that, I went Friday to the Family Leaders Family Leadership Summit. I wish I were better at estimating crowds, because I’d love to know how many showed up at Liberty and Justice, and I’d love to know how many Family Leader had in there. Sometimes it’s like hard.

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Dave Price: To tell, because of the way people are spaced out, and to your point, you know, Liberty and Justice wasn’t really, like, a meal, so you’re not sitting around tables, so you can jam a lot more people in there on a folding chair, whatever kind of chairs those were. So Family Leader had a bunch of people there.

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Dave Price: I know the ballroom very well, because my wife’s nonprofit organization has their big spring luncheon there, like, year after year after year, so I know ballroom A, or whatever the heck that is at the…

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Dave Price: at what used to be called Betts Auditorium, whatever it is now, community choice.

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Dave Price: Anyway, so, I mean, a lot of people. They, for sure, had a lot of people, and most of… Chuck Grassley wasn’t there. Joni Ernst was on the schedule, but wasn’t there. I don’t know if she ended up having a scheduling conflict, or what happened there. Kim Reynolds had kind of an emotional moment.

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Dave Price: They… there was a moment where I just sort of, like, had a flashback when they were sort of talking about what Kim Reynolds has done in office, because Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the family leader, is the one saying it, and as we know, Bob Vander Plaats wanted to be Terry Branstad’s running mate back in the day, whatever the heck year that was, 10?

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Laura Belin: 2010.

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Dave Price: And I was saying, well, boy, that’s… that’s kind of interesting now. I wonder… I doubt she… that went through her mind, but I was thinking, boy, how times change. He wanted the job, and now he’s praising…

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Dave Price: after she ascended to be Governor all these years. But and there was so there was. She got a little emotional talking about stuff, and she’s interweaving faith with her time in office, and what she tried to do, and Vander Plaats was very complimentary of things she accomplished, and afterwards they did sort of a group prayer kind of blessing her for

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Dave Price: What’s ahead in that? Zach Lahn also gave…

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Dave Price: also spoke up there and kind of wove in Christianity and the importance in his life. And, you know, he’s very much… he does a lot of historical anecdotes. He did that when we saw him at the Lincoln dinner.

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Dave Price: I’m always curious when he… when he goes deep into that stuff, if it works in that kind of setting.

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Dave Price: You know, if that’s, like, connecting with people, or if I’m overthinking this, because it’s like, you know, you can get out there

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Dave Price: Or, I mean, he goes sort of deep and philosophical. In this case, he’s.

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Dave Price: weaving in both history and, the spiritual importance to him and mistakes he’s made and, you know, kind of growing and all kinds of stuff. But, I mean, it seemed… it seemed well received. But my…

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Kathie Obradovich: It helps. I think it helps audiences. You know, that kind of helps audiences to get to know him as a candidate. But I don’t have to tell you guys. Reporters hate that.

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Dave Price: I know.

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Kathie Obradovich: Why? Because a long story with, you know, weaving in a variety of themes do not translate into news stories. I’m sorry, but you know, and, and even to do a video clip of something like that, you know, you start telling a story about in the case of the the, the Lincoln dinner about James Garfield.

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, the the accidental candidate for president, you know, etc. And and to explain an anecdote like that in, you know, even in 30 seconds is impossible. So, you know, as reporter, you know, the audience may be getting into all of this and the reporters are going, geez, how much time are you going to spend on this story?

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Dave Price: Oh my gosh, I am so glad you brought this up because at Lincoln Dinner in particular, I had to flip around the story that night for our 10 o’clock news for our gray media station group across the state.

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Dave Price: And, you know, you go through a meandering story like that and just, I mean, it’s just a long event, right? Like you have a lot of speakers. And the Kim Reynolds thing, she was up there with her two of her daughters, then she was up there with her granddaughter. And like, if you’re in the audience, you know, it’s an evening of entertainment, of course, but when you’re on a tight deadline, selfishly as a reporter, you’re like, gosh, dang.

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Dave Price: there’s so much stuff, and you’re already struggling with, like, what’s the story, right? Like, what should I focus on here? Because there are so many ways to take this. Jeff Kaufman, the party chair, he both spoke to the group at that event, he did a gaggle with us.

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Dave Price: and Zach Lahn, same, speech, and did a gaggle with us. Like, you could go a hundred different ways.

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Dave Price: But like in the back of your mind, you’re like, “Okay, what can I do that’s a good story that I can crank out quickly enough that is a fair assessment, a fair report about what just happened?” And it was sort of the same way, family leaders event was the same way.

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Dave Price: You’re standing there and this thing goes all day. So do you focus on some of the outside, the national folks who came in and they primarily spoke at the family leader thing primarily in the morning.

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Dave Price: You had Governor Reynolds there. You know, this is like the last time she will address this group like this. As governor, you have Zach Lahn, to your point, trying to introduce himself.

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Dave Price: Ashley Hinson was there, talking about how she keeps a Bible in her office in Congress as, like, her guide, to remind her about, service and sacrifice and all of that.

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Dave Price: Then the United States Speaker of the House is there. So it’s like, how do you not cover him? So you’re. And then you’re like, oh, but we got a deadline here. We got to have a story on television at five o’clock. So what can we do that’s going to be, like, super fast? So you have, like, this internal fight about. So the only way I found to do this lately is we just do multiple bites of the apple here. We did some quick turn stuff for TV, and then the

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Dave Price: longer piece that I’m putting together. I already put it together with Buttigieg.

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Dave Price: And as we record this, I’m finishing up a longer piece with Johnson. Johnson’s speech reminded me…

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Dave Price: of some of what Donald Trump campaigned on in 2024, where it’s very…

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Dave Price: It’s like this foreboding warning about what would happen.

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Dave Price: to the future of the country, and this is about saving the country, and making sure the country survives, and you gotta keep Republicans in power. He was really leaning into communism, Marxism, democratic socialism… I mean, those are 3 far different things.

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Dave Price: but saying that this is what’s happening. He counted 20-something Democratic Socialist congressional candidates across the country. I don’t really know how to fact-check that.

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Dave Price: And saying that they’re essentially gonna take over DC, and they’re gonna destroy a commitment to faith, like, it was very… I mean, it was heavy. It was heavy, but it reminded me of some of Trump’s warnings in 2024.

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Kathie Obradovich: It’s a different boogeyman, but the same strategy, right? So, you know, the last couple of cycles have been all about the enemy without the, you know, immigrants and that we have to be, you know, scared out of our boots by these, you know, criminals, alleged criminals who are coming across the border and being terribly afraid of all the crime, etc.

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Kathie Obradovich: And now it’s, you know, the enemy within that we have to be scared of.

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Kathie Obradovich: of democratic socialism, and, you know, somehow that this is going to be going off the rails. And it’s not a new tactic.

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, we’ve got, both parties, like to conflate the fringes of either party, you know, with the mainstream. So we hear, you know, you know, somehow that democratic socialists are, that a mainstream Democrat is exactly the same and has all the same goals.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, you know, the, Democrats do this with the fringes of the Republican Party, and how, you know, extreme they are, and they want to take away the votes from women, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So…

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Kathie Obradovich: So it’s not a new tactic. It is really interesting to me, though, that we’re now focused on communism as opposed to immigration in this cycle. We have to have a new enemy here to worry about.

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Dave Price: Laura, one of the three of us in this podcast has lived in a communist country. It would not be Kathie, as far as I know. I think I know Kathie.

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Kathie Obradovich: I have not.

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Dave Price: I don’t believe she’s had any secret former life, and I know I have not as well. So that would leave you. You have lived in a communist country. What do you think about when they start, when you start hearing the communist label?

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Laura Belin: Yeah. It and I was not at the event. I didn’t watch the speech. I did see the media coverage of the speech. I just it’s it’s a big eye roll for me. I studied Russian and Soviet history, and I visited the Soviet Union. I spent a summer in the Soviet Union doing a Russian language study program. And then I lived in the Czech Republic. That was in the post communist period, but I lived in the Czech Republic for several years and visited Russia several times.

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Laura Belin: while working there. So I feel like, not to pull rank on Mike Johnson, but I feel like I have a somewhat better understanding of what communism is and socialism is, and

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Laura Belin: You know, I don’t know why the democratic socialists call themselves that they’re not really.

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Laura Belin: Socialists in the sense of the government seizing the means of production, right, the government owning the means of production. In a communist country, there’s no private property, right? You don’t own your home, you don’t own much property. The agriculture is fully collectivized and so on, so nothing that anybody is talking about.

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Laura Belin: in any of these campaigns is really communism and socialism. Really, what the democratic socialists are mainly talking about is having a stronger social safety net. So if I were a communications consultant for them, I guess I would probably not recommend that they call themselves socialists, but it might be fair that there might be 20 democratic socialist candidates for Congress, but they’re not in a position to take over

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Laura Belin: The Congress and even if they did, I mean, they’d be talking about more support for caregivers, more child care, you know, the health care, well, I guess some of them may be talking about Medicare for all, depending on who’s

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Laura Belin: plan it is. That could mean, for some people, no private health insurance. But nobody’s talking about expropriating private property, okay? Nobody’s talking about banning religion like the way religion was suppressed in the Soviet Union. And even there, they didn’t completely ban religion. But nobody’s talking about suppressing Christianity the way it was suppressed in the communist world. So I think it’s just not realistic. I don’t know how much it will

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Laura Belin: work. To me, it sounds like a message very much aimed at getting the base Republican vote out. Okay, this is not a message targeted at swing voters.

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Dave Price: The boogeyman story, just to put a final point on this, Kathie, reminds me of a conversation I had at the Iowa State Fair I do not know how many years ago.

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Dave Price: but it was with David Young, and I feel like he was still in Congress at the time, and he told a fascinating story about the boogeyman mentality and how that works in politics, and I could be conflating a few things.

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Dave Price: I feel like whoever the house speaker was at that time had come to the fair. I could be old and confused right now.

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Dave Price: mixing up a bunch of stuff together, so I’d really have to sit down hard and remember, what the heck year was this? But I’m pretty sure he was in Congress, and I feel like there was a VIP who had come to the fair as well.

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Dave Price: forgive me if I’m mixing up a bunch of stuff. I know the boogeyman conversation happened, though, and it was fascinating the way Young had laid it out, and it’s… it, like, when you listen to it, while…

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Dave Price: Yes, it’s an exaggeration of all kinds of stuff, and…

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Dave Price: numerous politicians do this, and their strategists encourage them to do it. But it kind of makes sense, right? Like, rather than have all kinds of different nuances on party, on policy and everything. And even Speaker Johnson said something at the family leader thing Friday about. We’re not talking about marginal tax rates and arguing about that, you know. Now he’s

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Dave Price: taking it to the next level about, you know, this is the future of the country and stuff.

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Dave Price: But when you have that bad person, the boogeyman, it makes it so much more simplistic, and it pisses you off, and you’re all fired up, and it is this us versus them kind of thing, good versus evil, love versus hate. I mean, it plays on that emotions, and you’re not thinking.

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Dave Price: You know, in a cerebral way about, you know.

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Dave Price: policy and issues and all of that. You’re you’re ready to go. You’re you have your pitchfork, and you’re ready to burn the place down to protect your family and your country like you can see why it works.

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Kathie Obradovich: I mean, when you think about, you know.

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Kathie Obradovich: If these campaign, you know, rhetoric.

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Kathie Obradovich: actually translated into policy, okay? Because, I mean, you know, people sort of discounted Donald Trump when he was talking about, you know, well, we’re gonna, you know, get all the illegal immigrants out of this country. Nobody really believed that he was gonna actually try to get, you know.

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Kathie Obradovich: 5 or 6 million people who are undocumented out of the country. It looks like he’s trying pretty hard, actually, to do that now. I mean, so, you know, you look at, you know, the 19, you know, the Red Scare of the past and, you know, blackballing people in society and, you know, how do we root out communists among us in a society? And, you know, all you have to do is look

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Kathie Obradovich: at history and how that was done. And a lot of people’s lives were ruined, you know, because people would, you know, claim that they’re communists and whether they were or not. So it is a it is interesting to think about, you know, how you take this campaign rhetoric and actually how do you actually translate that into policy?

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Dave Price: Speaking of rooting out, I wonder if we can take our last few minutes here and talk about Attorney General Brenna Byrd kicked off the inaugural meeting of this Medicaid Fraud Elimination Task Force. Governor appointed her as the chair of this task force, and this has been a Republican.

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Dave Price: priority on the federal level under the Trump administration, for sure, about rooting out alleged fraud. Some have said this is rampant all over the place. We’ve not seen, as the case with a lot of this stuff, it’s sort of like migrant crime as well. You know, you find some

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Dave Price: incidents of it somewhere, and then blow it up and say that it’s everywhere. Our state has a low

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Dave Price: fraud rate, according to what was reported on the Federal level. As Attorney General Byrd said, though, that any fraud is too much fraud. So where is this going to go, do you think?

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Kathie Obradovich: The way I, where it usually goes, is instead of,

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Kathie Obradovich: finding and rooting out fraud that’s actually happening, the conversation turns to preventing fraud. And that then turns into a lot more stringent application requirements and paperwork and red tape for people who might qualify for these services and for providers.

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Kathie Obradovich: And so, yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: that actually, ends up cutting down access to healthcare, because you have people who, you know, might qualify but can’t keep up with the paperwork, and you’ve got providers who, you know, the paperwork becomes so onerous that they just stop seeing Medicaid patients.

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Kathie Obradovich: So I hope that the focus really does stay on enforcement. And, you know, I would just throw out one suggestion for this group. Look at the Board of Medicine. We write stories all the time. And, you know, there are there are incidents of Medicaid and Medicare fraud that happen. And, you know, a lot of times it’s.

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, people who are

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Kathie Obradovich: Selling assistive devices that aren’t needed or all those kinds of things, and the Board of Medicine works so slowly, it takes months and months and months to investigate and eventually take licensure board action against some of these providers who, you know, are actually, you know, they might even have been criminally charged with fraud, and it takes a long time.

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Kathie Obradovich: to, impose any sort of discipline on them. So, you know, I hope they do take a look at

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Kathie Obradovich: Things that will actually make a difference with bad actors, as opposed to saying, okay, everybody, you know, to prevent fraud, we’re gonna have to impose a lot more paperwork and red tape on you.

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Laura Belin: I did not attend the first meeting of the task force, but I find it interesting that the whole orientation of the task force is

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Laura Belin: Let’s make sure that no one’s getting any money or services that they aren’t entitled to. Whereas there’s a huge issue, and there was a lot of good reporting on this earlier in the year. Tony Lays, who now reports for KFF, had a feature on this, and I I think the the Des Moines Register may have as well of these Medicaid, the managed care organizations, the insurance companies that are managing Medicaid, they’re massively cutting back on

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Laura Belin: the home-based services.

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Laura Belin: that people are entitled to. And that’s causing issues with some families feeling like they may need to institutionalize people who would rather be living at home. But that is not the focus of this task force at all, right? People not getting the services that they are entitled to is not something that they seem to be looking at at all. They’re only looking at are there any people who are improperly

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Laura Belin: getting paid. So, I mean, that’s a choice, that’s a policy choice that they made not to look at the other side of the equation.

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Dave Price: Let’s wrap it up there for the week.

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Laura Belin: Can I give one bit of trivia, Dave? I you you walked down memory Lahn, and it reminded me. This is one of my favorite bits of trivia that I have a feeling our listeners would enjoy. You mentioned that in twenty ten, Terry Branstad won the primary. Bob Vander Plaats was a, you know, close second in the primary. And there was a real.

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Dave Price: None.

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Laura Belin: there was a real effort at the Republican State Convention to nominate Vanderpod’s

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Laura Belin: as Lieutenant Governor. He got more than 500 delegate votes, if I recall, and instead of just having it be a rubber stamp for Kim Reynolds. Do you happen to know who gave the nominating speech for Kim Reynolds to be Terry Branstad’s running mate at the GOP state convention in 2010?

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Dave Price: I don’t remember that.

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Laura Belin: Kathie?

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Kathie Obradovich: I don’t remember either.

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Laura Belin: Congressman Steve King.

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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, interesting.

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Dave Price: Oh, yeah.

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Laura Belin: Yeah. So he he was out there vouching for Kim Reynolds to be the running mate anyway.

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Kathie Obradovich: Hmm, okay.

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Laura Belin: They had a falling out much later.

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Dave Price: Fascinating, I did not.

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Kathie Obradovich: That is interesting.

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Dave Price: No.

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Laura Belin: Yep. I thought our listeners would enjoy.

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Dave Price: I don’t have as good a one for that, but just a random fact. When I’m hearing Kathie talk about fraud, a kid I grew up with who was a twin, and his mom was our 4H local leader. We used to go to the house for

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Dave Price: for meetings. Now, also a fun fact with that family, they were busted, showing produce at our county fair.

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Dave Price: and clearly bought the produce at the store. How were they busted? They literally left the price tags

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Dave Price: on the produce that they submitted, which is almost impossible to believe that it happened. Clearly, she ended up no longer being our 4-H later, but one of her boys, who later became a doctor.

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Dave Price: was busted for insurance fraud and went to prison. I followed a little bit of that on… I saw some nugget on Facebook, and I deep… kind of did a deep dive into that one day, and I thought.

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Dave Price: all right, I guess the old apple did not fall far from the tree on this one. And it’s, like, so weird. I went… I went… grew up with these kids. Like, I didn’t play with them a ton, because we didn’t live near each other. They lived near our elementary school, but… you know, like…

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Laura Belin: Wow. It’s still hard to process that. Like on your county fair entry though.

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Dave Price: Like who does that? Like you bought it at the store? Like who seriously does that?

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Dave Price: And it’s not like the prizes we got were so crazy, and they weren’t like a destitute family trying to… I mean, they weren’t rich by any means, but the whole… I never could process… I remember when we found out, and I was a little kid, and you’re like, what the heck? But I remember that it had the…

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Dave Price: They forgot to take the little price sticker off there, so…

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Kathie Obradovich: Hilarious. I love it.

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Laura Belin: Try it out.

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Dave Price: Who knows?

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Laura Belin: I don’.

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Dave Price: what to make of that. That should be a Netflix documentary one time.

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Dave Price: Anyway, okay, hey, thanks for… thanks for adjusting on, the recording schedule. Kathie, I hope you feel better. Tell your husband to quit spreading his germs. What the heck? That’s not a way to show love.

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Dave Price: And I hope you both have a good weekend and a great week, and we will talk to you next week. Thank you to all of you for your support here of the Iowa Down Ballot podcast. I won’t get into these details, but I really appreciate the private conversations at the Family Leader, from a couple folks in the crowd there who are regulars of the podcast.

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Dave Price: And we very much appreciate your support. Thanks to those of you who have helped support this financially. We very much appreciate you helping to defray some of the production costs to produce this week after week. Those who have been with us from the beginning, those who have come on as new paid subscribers recently, if you’re thinking about doing that, we hope that you will consider joining them as well to keep us going week after week.

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Dave Price: week. Thanks for being with us this week. Have a great week ahead. We’ll talk to you next week.

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