92.7 WOBM News – Flash Briefing June 29 5AM

https://jerseyshorepodcasts.townsquaredigital.com/WOBMNEWS%205AM%206-29-17.mp3

In downtown Toms River Wednesday afternoon, opponents of the Health Care Bill now in the Senate demanded a no-vote from Shore Congressman Tom MacArthur when it returns to the house.

Protesters gathered around town hall trying to draw attention by singing songs, making speeches and chanting.

Priscilla Robinson of the New Jersey Organizing Project asserted that there is no room for change or compromise in Obamacare.

"I really believe that the most vulnerable and everybody in our society deserves to have affordable and adequate health care that protects them from disease and destruction," said Robinson.

MacArthur long ago said that the Obamacare replacement plan isn't perfect, but that in the end Obamacare doesn't work and needs to be replaced.

Details are finally available about the district-level impacts of the additional revisions being made to school funding, to secure Governor Christie's support for the changes.

Our Statehouse Bureau Chief Michael Symons says no district will lose more than 2-percent of the aid promised in March.

"More than two-thirds of districts losing aid do better because of their revisions and most of them do a lot better with the cuts shrunk by at least half in 72 of those 87 districts," said Symons.

The latest revisions help primarily in districts along the shore and in Sussex County.

They also reduce the increases the changes would have delivered other districts.

The investigation in Lakewood continues where 14 people are facing charges of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from medicaid and government assistance programs.

Many local residents say they're very surprised that this is happening in their community.

“I think we should learn from this and in the future we should try to be a hundred-percent straight, even if it’s not a hundred percent dishonest what was done.”

Another Lakewood resident says he knows several of the people who've been arrested and they are honest, upstanding citizens.

The largely Orthodox Jewish community was shaken this week when a Rabbi and seven others were placed in handcuffs by the FBI and charged with lying about their income so they could collect a lot of public assistance.

Reports began surfacing Tuesday night that hundreds of residents have been calling township officials and Ocean County Community Services, in an effort to apparently avoid the same fate as those arrested so far and the charges pinned against them.

More From WOBM: