Hell just got several degrees colder.
MONTGOMERY | The conservative Republican governor of Alabama, a Deep South state where "Obamacare" is often reviled, said Thursday that his administration is mulling an expansion of the state's Medicaid program under the federal health care law.
Gov. Robert Bentley, a dermatologist turned governor, emphasized that he was in the exploratory stages—and said funding the state's share of costs could be a major stumbling block—but his comments were the strongest to date about the possible acceptance of expansion dollars in the deeply red, high-poverty state.
"We are looking at that. We have not made a final decision on that yet, exactly how that would work," Bentley said Thursday in response to an audience question about expansion after a speech at a legal conference.
He is motivated, he says, by "the plight of the working poor." If it happens, Alabama would be the first of the Deep South states to fall, and would bring coverage to about 300,000 people who now make too much to qualify for regular Medicaid and not enough to be eligible for subsidies on the Obamacare marketplace. That's about $16,000 annually for an individual (who generally don't qualify for regular Medicaid anyway) and $33,000 for a family of four. Bentley recognizes the need to get these people covered and, he says, to attract medical personnel to impoverished parts of the state. He's also probably looking at the boost to revenues and to the state hospitals that expansion would provide, though he won't admit that. Because he's giving himself the out of how the state would fund its share of the cost beginning in 2017, when the federal government's contribution starts dropping from 100 percent to the eventual match at 90 percent.
So you've got an extremely Republican governor in one of the reddest states in the Deep South contemplating taking the evil Obamacare. You've got the newly elected tea party governor in Kentucky, Matt Bevin, reconsidering whether he really wants to dump 418,000 people out of the program, along with losing 12,000 already-created jobs and nearly over $900 million in the next few years. And you have a Republican Senate conference now divided over whether they really want to vote to do this or not.
It's way too early to say for certain, but it looks a tiny bit like sanity—or self-preservation—might be infiltrating the GOP.