Obamacare may have rolled out successfully on Tuesday, but it turns out millions of low-income minority families and single mothers in Republican-controlled states aren’t reaping the benefits.
In fact, 8 million will not get health care coverage under Obamacare because their states have refused to participate in expansions of Medicaid, according to Census data. In short, the very kinds of people the program was intended to help will not be covered.
According to the NYT:
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.
The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are about 68 percent poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. They account for about half of the country’s population. And about 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states as well.
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.”
And what do Republicans in these states have to say about those sobering facts?
“Any additional cost in Medicaid is going to be too much,” said State Senator Chris McDaniel, a Republican, who opposes expansion.
In other words, the American people aren’t worth it. Ouch.
SOURCE: NYT
