Obamacare repeal—and with it the Medicaid expansion that has helped so many people in so many Republican states—is losing a lot of luster now that it's actually a possibility. That's leading to some second thoughts among Republican senators from expansion states.
Altogether, there will likely be 20 Republican senators from Medicaid expansion states next term. Many come from so-called "Trump country," the industrial and rust belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that were critical to Trump's win. Working class whites in general have been among the top beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion.
"I'm from a state that has an expanded Medicaid population that I am very concerned about," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) this week. "I don't want to throw them off into the cold, and I don't think that's a strategy that I want to see. It's too many people. That's over 200,000 people in my state. So we need a transition. I think we'll repeal and then we'll work during the transition period for the replacement vehicle." […]
"A number of us have been talking about that you want to make sure that any repairing and fixing—because it clearly needs repairing and fixing—that we do now takes into account the current situation with different states that have taken different actions. Indiana's expansion was different from ours, was different from Ohio's. ... It's a topic that a lot of us were focused on it," said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK).
Sens. Capito and Sullivan apparently haven't been paying a lot of attention to what their fellow Republicans—most particularly House Speaker Paul Ryan—have in mind for Medicaid. This whole "repeal and delay" replacement strategy is going to be messy and it's going to mean nothing good for the population now on Medicaid. What Ryan has in mind, what he's going to stick with, is turning the program into a block grant to allow states to do basically whatever they want with those federal funds. And giving the working poor health care isn't going to be high on the list for many, not when all the other federal money they've been getting dries up under Ryan's starve-the-government agenda.
As of a year ago, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, there were at least 2.5 million people with expanded Medicaid coverage represented by Republican senators. That's a very conservative estimate, because three states had reporting issues and weren't included in the report and since then both Montana and Louisiana have taken the expansion. And across the nation, more than 16 million people, many of whom are those white working class people, have that Medicaid that Ryan wants to do away with. An abject lesson in being careful what you wish for.