North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is not going to be intimidated by whatever Republicans throw at him, and boy, what they've thrown at him is epic. He's not going to roll over for them, particularly when it means fighting for the people of his state. In a move that has national implications, he's forging ahead on Medicaid expansion.
Gov. Roy Cooper plans to take immediate executive action aimed at expanding Medicaid, defying a state law and setting up a confrontation with the Republican-dominated state legislature.
Addressing a group of business leaders at an economic forum Wednesday morning, the governor – who was sworn into office on New Year’s Day – said he would file an amendment to the state Medicaid plan by Friday. The new plan would allow hundreds of thousands more people to sign up for government health insurance.
The amended plan would expand Medicaid as outlined in the Affordable Care Act and would have to be approved by federal officials. But Cooper has only about two weeks until President-elect Donald Trump, an adamant opponent of the law dubbed Obamacare, takes office. Trump has vowed to get rid of it. […]
Cooper, a Democrat, said in a news conference following his talk that the law impinges on “the core executive authority of the governor to accept federal funds to look out for the health of the people.”
If he can pull this off in the next two weeks, that makes one more state that has Medicaid expansion and tens of thousands more who have access to health care who otherwise wouldn't. That makes repealing Obamacare and gutting Medicaid that much harder for congressional Republicans. They're already hearing from Republican governors like Michigan's Rick Snyder and Ohio's John Kasich who are fighting for the Medicaid expansion that's helped hundreds of thousands of their constituents.