When it comes to state services, you get what you pay for.

That reality came into sharp focus in recent days as the coronavirus tightened its deadly grip on Oklahoma.

Not only was an already stressed health care system driven closer to the brink, but also a job-loss safety net quickly unraveled as 67,000 COVID-19 unemployment claims were filed in just two weeks.

This chaos is the all-too-predictable result of a decade’s worth of starvation budgets imposed by an uber-conservative Legislature hard-wired to believe smaller, leaner government would automatically – magically – yield better results.

It hasn’t. And now Norman resident Christina Owen and her family are among many workaday Oklahomans sufferinging first-hand from an ideologically-driven public policy experiment gone horribly wrong.

In this week’s Observercast – Episode 9: Covid Comes To Oklahoma – Christina details her family’s gut-wrenching fight to keep a roof over their heads, the lights on, and food on the table, and state Rep. Forrest Bennett shares what he’s hearing from anguished and angry constituents whose state government is letting them down in their hour of need.

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