This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Talk about judicial restraint.

Utah Chief Justice Matthew Durrant made a clear case to the 2016 Legislature Monday that the primary accomplishment of the 2015 Legislature is doomed unless the body puts its money where its mouth was.

In the annual State of the Judiciary Address, the chief explained that the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a reform that promises to both save lives and save money, won't work unless the state puts the necessary funds into alternatives to prison, specifically treatment for those suffering from substance abuse and mental health issues.

Durrant pointed out that the JRI will guide many criminals out of prison and toward treatment. But only if the treatment, which the Legislature has so far neglected to fund, is there. If it isn't, then a chance to reduce crime and costs will be lost, and crime might actually go up.

But the chief also avoided, perhaps as beyond his brief, stating the obvious.

The quickest, most cost-effective way to fund one of Utah's greatest accomplishments would be for the Legislature to put aside its irrational hatred of President Barack Obama and institute, in some form, the Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act.

Many other states, including some that are controlled by Republicans, quickly saw the benefits of accepting millions of federal dollars to bolster their own health care systems, pump new life into one of the few economic sectors that cannot be off-shored and relieve the most dangerous burden of poverty from the shoulders of tens of thousands of people.

Utah has stubbornly, cruelly refused.

Gov. Gary Herbert commendably cobbled together a plan to get much of the money without giving Obama any of the credit. His Healthy Utah alternative kept much of what was wrong with a pre-ACA system, mostly the drain of resources created by for-profit health insurance plans. But it met the goal of offering coverage to many people who now lack that basic aspect of life in a civilized nation.

The Utah Senate passed the needed legislation. The House, meeting over and over in secret sessions, killed it.

If House Republicans do not believe in the judicial reforms they passed, then they should not have voted for them. If they do not see the fiscal and humanitarian advantages to shifting both human and financial capital out of incarceration and toward treatment, then they should have killed the JRI, just as they repeatedly kill Medicaid, Healthy Utah and everything else that so much as smells like it.

There really was no logical or political sense in passing one and killing the other. But, apparently, the drive to make sure the poor don't receive health care, and that Obamacare fails in Utah, is more important to them than anything else.