When you lose Jan Brewer, you know the Republican disaster known as Trumpcare is indeed a huge stinker. An analysis by the state of Arizona has some devastating news for 380,000 Arizonans. They and their families will be devastated.
Never liked Brewer, but she’s right here. This is life or death for Arizonans and millions of Americans.
www.thestate.com/…
Arizona is likely to see more than 380,000 people lose their Medicaid insurance coverage and $2.5 billion in lower health care spending under the plan currently being pushed through Congress to replace former President Barack Obama's health care law, according to a new state report.
The analysis by the state's Medicaid plan obtained by The Associated Press Friday shows keeping most of those people insured would cost the state nearly $500 million a year by 2023. In a Republican-led state where tax increases are nearly impossible to enact, that's extremely unlikely.
The report looks at the patients who gained coverage under a Medicaid expansion pushed through in 2013 by former Gov. Jan Brewer over opposition from many in her own party. It now covers about 400,000 Arizonans out of the 1.9 million covered by Medicaid in the state.
Of those 400,000, about 316,000 are childless adults who earn less than the federal poverty limit, and 81,000 earn between 100 percent and 138 percent of the limit.
Brewer said in an interview earlier this week that "it weighs heavy on my heart" when she thinks of the current Republican plan to repeal and replace Obama's law.
"It just really affects our most vulnerable, our elderly, our disabled, our childless adults, our chronically mentally ill, our drug addicted," she said of the potential elimination of coverage for the expansion population. "It will simply devastate their lives and the lives that surround them. Because they're dealing with an issue which is very expensive to take care of as a family with no money."