Health Reform Gap: 5 Million Without Health Care In States That Opted Out

[Purveyor]

Last edited Mon Dec 30, 2013, 06:56 PM - Edit history (1)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America.

They make up a coverage gap in President Barack Obama's signature health care law created by the domino effects of last year's Supreme Court ruling and states' subsequent policy decisions.

The court effectively left it up to states to decide whether to open Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled, to more people, primarily poor working adults without children.

Twenty-five states declined. That leaves 4.8 million people in those states without the health care coverage that their peers elsewhere are getting through the expansion of Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. More than one-fifth of them live in Texas alone, Kaiser's analysis found.

Among those in the gap is Cheryl Jones, a 61-year-old part-time home-care worker from Erie, Pa., who makes do without health insurance by splitting in half pills for high blood pressure, which she gets from a friend, not a pharmacist. She'd also like to visit a dentist to fix her broken partial dentures. A new pair of glasses might be nice, too.

MORE...

http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2013/12/health_reform_gap_5_million_wi.html

[Wounded Bear]

1. If only we could get the word out to them...

I'm sure far too many of them are listening to Faux News and learning to blame the evil, lazy, liberals for not letting the insurance companies provide them with those platinum plans they would all qualify for if the gubmint would just get out of the way.

Hey, you gov and your leg just screwed you! Are you listening?

[Warren Stupidity]

2. What an amazingly dishonest headline.

Medicaid growth didn't create a gap, it filled in a big chunk of the gap that already existed. Dishonest horseshit.

[enough]

3. You're right, and the headline seems to be telling a totally different story

from the actual article. Some unwarranted editorializing there in the headline.

[Purveyor]

6. Ping. See #5 eom

[Purveyor]

5. Found a better headline that didn't exist at the time I put the article up (and I looked).

[Shandris]

4. Bad headline, but the article itself is accurate.

I should know -- I live with one of those left in the gap. Fortunately there is still insurance (if you can call it that), but we can't find a better policy other than the one offered at work because if you do, you don't get the subsidy (its a stipulation that if work offers insurance and you voluntarily choose to use the exchange instead, no subsidy. Not that we're getting a subsidy in the first place, that I can tell) and they're even more expensive than the trash 'insurance' we have now.

I can't -believe- that such an important fucking bill was predicated on Republican governors playing nicely. I recognize it's not directly President Obama's fault, but goddamn shouldn't SOMEONE have figured out that this was going to happen? How hard was it to predict that Republicans would fight every angle of it they could?!

[Zorra]

8. You have a point. If something nasty, rotten, and evil can be done, republicans will do it.

A fact of life in America.

[Shandris]

10. I live in a state filled with them.

BELIEVE me, I know.

[spanone]

7. may all the repuke governors be voted out of office.

making their citizens pay for their partisanship....

[Gothmog]

9. In Texas, the Democrats are trying to motivate voters with the theme "Texas Left Me Out"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/107813898

The voters who were left behind need to vote the GOP out of power

[napkinz]

11. kick

nt