NH Gov. Maggie Hassan, get your bill-signing pen warmed up!
The Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity has been
running ads in New Hampshire—using Republican activists as "victims"—and
lobbying the legislature to kill Medicaid expansion. They just
lost on Medicaid.
CONCORD – With an 18-5 bipartisan vote, the Senate Thursday approved a plan to provide private insurance for the state's low-income adults paid for by Medicaid funds under the Affordable Care Act. […]
The bill is expected to be approved by the Democratic-controlled House by early April and sent to Gov. Maggie Hassan, who supports the bill.
As much fun as this loss for the Kochs is, the larger point is that it means health insurance coverage for about 50,000 New Hampshire residents. Those people would otherwise have fallen into the gap between traditional Medicaid and eligibility for subsidies to get insurance on the exchange, and would have remained uninsured.
But more states expanding Medicaid—and more states seeing hundreds of thousands of people getting covered on the exchanges—means politics gets a lot more complicated for Republicans who have nothing to run on but repeal.