The Human Cost of Refusing to Expand Medicaid

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HHS has announced an exemption to Obamacare’s individual mandate:

As the Obama administration took new steps Wednesday to implement the healthcare law’s individual mandate, it clarified an exemption for people whose governors don’t take part in the expanded Medicaid program….Notably, HHS clarified that the mandate doesn’t apply to people who are eligible for Medicaid but live in states that don’t take part in the law’s Medicaid expansion.

Right. If you’re so poor that you qualify for Medicaid, but your state’s Republican governor refuses to allow you to have Medicaid coverage, the federal government won’t demand that you pay for private coverage instead. This is mere common sense, since such people don’t have the money in the first place. Ed Kilgore puts this in human terms:

By my rough back-of-the-envelope calculation from Kaiser Family Foundation numbers, there are about 4 million of such unlucky duckies in the 10 states that are pretty clearly not going to participate in the Medicaid expansion, a number that could jump to well over 5 million if Rick Scott manages to keep Florida out as well….So what do they care about the injustice of this coverage hole? Not a thing, clearly.

Nope, not a thing.

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“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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