Good Monday morning, as we salute our veterans.. No, you didn't dream it, the Gopher football squad is 9-0 for the first time in over 100 years. And now, here's your Digest. 1. Peterson defends his impeachment vote. Rep. Collin Peterson has been getting a lot of attention since he cast one of just two Democratic votes against the House impeachment inquiry last week. Minnesota’s 7th District congressman — who represents nearly all of the western part of the state — seemed amused Friday by all the interest in his impeachment vote: He said it’s consistent with his criticism of the impeachment process from the beginning. "What I've said all along is that you can't do this with one party,” he said after a meeting with farmers in Moorhead, Minn. “It's not smart and it's not going to work. I think if this is handled incorrectly, it will reelect Trump. That's what I think." Peterson said his vote against the impeachment inquiry was a vote against a process of which he’s skeptical. MPR News
2. Commission struggles to find health care savings. The task: find $100 million in savings in state health spending. The timeline: one year. That’s the edict for a new commission created by lawmakers last session to try to trim the rising cost of state health care programs. The Health and Human Services Blue Ribbon Commission, a 17-member panel, includes experts in health care, social services, equity and health care technology. Four members are appointed by the Legislature, and the rest are picked by Gov. Tim Walz. It was created earlier this spring to end gridlock on the state budget. Republicans spent all session railing on Democrats for what they called waste, fraud and abuse in state health care spending, and they wanted a concrete plan to start reducing costs. The commission’s work has now started, but it’s slow going, and some members are already daunted by the work. MPR News
3. Study finds Twitter attacks on Omar represent voices of a few. President Trump has made criticism of Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar a prominent part of his rallies. He's also targeted her on Twitter, prompting others to do the same. But a study out last week details how a small group of bad actors started that tweet storm long before Omar was on the president's radar. And the study's authors are calling for Twitter to do more than ban paid political ads, as it announced last week. They say this unpaid messaging actually may be more damaging. “To give you some idea of the influence of some of these accounts, one would expect that if we're looking at Ilhan Omar's Twitter network, Minnesota Public Radio would be a very influential voice. In fact, you're not.” said Lawrence Pintak, a professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University and lead researcher on the study. MPR News
4. Senators say White House limits on refugee resettlement could starve program. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and nine other Democratic senators this week requested a briefing with Trump administration leaders, saying that the White House’s historic decrease in 2020 admissions for refugees could damage the country’s long-term ability to resettle them. They said lowering the cap on refugee admissions — down from 110,000 in President Barack Obama’s final year to 18,000 for the new fiscal year — could effectively end the program by “starving the infrastructure” built by resettlement agencies. “The Trump administration’s sweeping, structural changes to our refugee admissions and resettlement process merit thorough deliberations between Congress and the executive branch,” the senators wrote in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan. Minnesota admitted just 663 refugees as primary arrivals in the 2018 fiscal year, the latest for which statistics are fully available. That was the lowest in at least a decade, reflecting Trump’s reduction of the refugee admissions ceiling to 30,000 nationally that year. In the first nine months of 2019, Minnesota took in 775 refugees. Star Tribune
5. Minnesota could lose millions from ACA changes. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will change how they fund Minnesota’s health care system, resulting in a projected loss of millions in federal health care funding used by the state. Since 2015, funding provided by the Affordable Care Act’s Basic Health Program has been used to support MinnesotaCare, the state’s health insurance program for those that earn too much to receive Medicaid, but have incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Only two states currently use the funding: Minnesota and New York. With the new rules, the states are set to lose a combined $151 million in 2019, according to CMS’ own analysis. New York’s program is significantly larger, and the state is projected to lose the lion’s share of that amount. In May, Minnesota was projected to lose $24 million for 2019 and 2020, but the Minnesota Minnesota Department of Human Service (DHS) is still calculating the fiscal impact of the final rule. MinnPost | 