The coverage gap in ‘ObamaCare’ is due to red state sabotage
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The red states continue to vote against their own economic best interests because of "freedom!" to be ignorant and poor.
The New York Times breaks down the coverage gap in "ObamaCare" due to red state governors and legislatures sabotaging coverage for their poor citizens (with an assist from the Roberts Supreme Court on making participation in expanded Medicaid optional). Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law:
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of
Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single
mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have
insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to
help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.
Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have
declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical
insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million
Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The
federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less
than 90 percent of costs in later years.
Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people
with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on
the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are
poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has
income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.
Interactive map Where Poor and Uninsured Americans Live
The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are
home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of
poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the
country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those
excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’
aides.
“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion —
many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of
poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H.
Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is
their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to
the entire health care system.”