The white-hot tea party anger against Obamacare has cooled and the extremist base is now all distracted by Donald Trump. At the same time, states are ever-challenged to balance their budgets and right there, in the Obamacare statute, is the answer: Medicaid expansion. But how do Republican lawmakers justify flip-flopping to take the dreaded Obamacare while declaring their undying hatred of it? In some pretty byzantine ways, as documented by Huffington Post's Jeffrey Young.
Red state governors and lawmakers are deciding what health care for low-income people and those with disabilities delivered through Medicaid, the joint federal-state health benefit program, will look like in the post-Obamacare era.
“This, at this point, is largely a fight within the Republican Party,” said Joan Alker, executive director for the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University, who is an expert on Medicaid issues.
In some cases, Republicans have concocted pretty convoluted ways to do Obamacare without saying they’re doing Obamacare, to get other Republicans to go along.
That includes Oklahoma: "In order to sell a proposed Medicaid expansion in the Sooner State, the administration of Gov. Mary Fallin (R) is framing it as a contraction of the program." How? By moving some pregnant women and children currently on Medicaid onto the federally subsidized health insurance exchanges, thereby opening up more Medicaid slots to poor adults. Then there's Arkansas, where Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) and the legislature worked out an insanely convoluted plan where the legislature passed the continued expansion along with a line repealing it—so all the Republicans say they voted for repeal—and Hutchinson then used his line-item veto to strike out the repeal. Yes, that is ridiculous.
But it’s no more ridiculous than John Kasich running for president on his Christian compassion, using Medicaid expansion as his example, while signing legislation that would make poor people—even people well below the poverty line—pay more out-of-pocket for that Medicaid. "And the plan also would take away coverage from a slew of low-income groups, including breast and cervical cancer patients, and children when they turn 18." How very Christian of him. That plan, however, has to be approved by the Obama administration, and that's not likely.
Meanwhile, "[n]early one in ten uninsured people (2.9 million) fall into the coverage gap due to their state’s decision not to expand Medicaid."
