On Tuesday, the NC House of Representatives will vote on H115, the bill that hands over control of the health insurance exchange to Big Insurance and their allies. I’m still hoping it can be stopped, but there hasn’t been much attention paid by the media, even though we advocates have tried and tried to call attention to it. The Raleigh News & Observer did a story, but there has been nothing out here in the western end of the state.

There’s also a bill to deny low-interest student loans to community college students, who often attend community college for financial reasons. These are people who may already work for a living and are trying to train for a job that will support them better. Kids who go to private universities are more often from families with the money to afford college.

Another bill would take money away from public schools to pay for charter and private schools. A voucher for private school tuition just takes money from public schools that already are underfunded. It won’t improve education; in fact, it likely will make public education worse.

The legislature is ramming through all sorts of bad legislation in its first 100 days, hoping to change the state to a place where being poor is seen as a moral failure of some sort.

They believe government jobs should be cut, but those jobs are real jobs. To cut them means putting people out of work where they will collect unemployment compensation instead of paying taxes. That seems to be more expensive to me.

In fact, a lot of the social changes the right wants to make will cost taxpayers money or make things even harder on working-class  and poor Americans. Let’s say you cut money for free clinics, so people lose their access to care. It costs more than three times as much to treat them in the emergency room, and the care is less comprehensive. Remember, the emergency room only has to stabilize patients — to address the symptoms, not necessarily the cause.

If Planned Parenthood is cut, where do poor women go for annual checkups, contraceptives and prenatal care? It’s very likely that more babies will die from neglect than ever did from abortion at Planned Parenthood.

Even in Wisconsin, where the flap is all about the power of public employees to negotiate with the state, there are draconian measures in the bill to cut services and cut public jobs.

This is not about the budget at all; this is about whether the middle class even survives, both figuratively and literally.