Tennessee Shows How Republicans Are Learning To Love Obamacare
Republican-led states that blocked Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion have found a way to embrace it, under pressure from businesses to tap the flood of federal dollars it brings.
Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Haslam called lawmakers into a special session this week to consider accepting federal money to extend public health-care assistance to more of the poor. Indiana announced its expansion last week. Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming are considering it.
“There’s been a lot of politicking from employers, from hospitals, from providers saying, ‘Don’t leave this money on the table’,” said Nathan, who’s studying how states are implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. “There’s a shift. You can feel it. You can feel that the sands are shifting.”
The Republican opposition to increasing the scale of the federal program left many earning as much as 138 percent of the poverty line, about $27,700 a year for a family of three, still without coverage even as more than 15 million received benefits under the law. Medicaid is administered by states under rules set by the federal government, which is currently covering 100 percent of the cost of those who are newly eligible. That share will be phased down to 90 percent by 2020.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/tennessee-shows-republicans-learning-love-obamacare/
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