Campaign Action
There are 78,000 uninsured people in Idaho, people who don't make enough money to receive subsidies to buy insurance on the state's very successful Obamacare health insurance exchange, but who don't qualify for Medicaid because of the this low-wage, right-to-work state's stringent limits. That includes people like these folks.
“You going to be okay?” asked [Jamie Fluch’s] wife, 44-year-old Chelle Gluch. Jamie grunted “I’m all right” and joined the children at their in-home day-care business, who were watching cartoons on the sofa.
Gluch’s tooth had rotted weeks before, but seeing a dentist was an unthinkable expense after car trouble sucked up the family’s savings. […]
“I was thrilled with the Affordable Care Act and thought we’d get out of this mess,” Chelle Gluch said as snow piled up outside their home in the state’s Treasure Valley. “And then Idaho didn’t adopt it. I cried for days. It was our only hope.” […]
Chelle Gluch, who lost a long shot bid for state Senate, has run her day-care for two decades and is finishing up work to attain a teacher’s certificate. Jamie is a roofer and welder who said he cannot keep steady work because of agonizing stomach pains no doctor has diagnosed. They began hunting more to cut grocery costs. A friend donated chickens. They get fresh eggs in the morning, and owe $65,000 in medical bills.
Back in 2012, following the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Obamacare but give states the opportunity to forego Medicaid expansion, Idaho's Republican governor and legislature decided to go the route that would inflict the most harm on the most vulnerable and cost the state the most money. Gov. Butch Otter blustered his way into selling the idea of the state setting up its own exchange because somehow using Healthcare.gov would mean the jackboots of the feds on the throat of all Idaho. What he wouldn't do is take millions in federal dollars to help the state's working poor. But then he directed the state to start looking at alternatives for providing health care to those folks.
He said he would come up with a replacement, and he created commissions to do so. The first unanimously recommended taking the Medicaid expansion. It was ignored. Four years later, a handful of legislators have come up with plans to extend coverage, at least realizing that it's something they should maybe try to do. But that handful hasn't been able to convince the majority of legislators that it's their responsibility to act. Four years later, those plans and proposals—like the one "offering the working poor tax incentives if they use a life coach to motivate them to get higher-paying jobs"—have gone nowhere. "While it is clear there is broad agreement on the fact there is a problem," Otter wrote to the Washington Post for this story, "agreement on what to do about it is another story."
Sound familiar? It does to Liz Woodruff, a policy analyst with a network of hospitals and nonprofit organizations who has been trying to persuade Idaho to expand Medicaid. "It feels like we're watching the macro version in Washington of what's been happening here," she says. We are. Which is pretty fucking pathetic, if you know the Idaho legislature.
This should be a cautionary tale for congressional Republicans, because they really don't want to be like Idaho. Well, maybe they do, but the rest of the country— the 45 states ahead of us in education, the 47 states ahead of us in mental health services, the 39 states with fewer uninsured—they don't want you to make the rest of the country Idaho. Don't do it. Don't repeal Obamacare.