North Carolina: Why Opposition To Medicaid Expansion "Damns" The Poor

 Alan: The refusal to expand Medicaid in state with Republican governors will come back to haunt the GOP. (N.B. The federal government is committed to paying all expansion costs in year one and 90% of expansion costs forevermore. Nevertheless, Republicans would rather oppress the poor than provide them with life-saving insurance. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html)

***

"[F]or nine out of ten of the people she talks with, she says, it seems as if there's nothing she can do. They're too poor to qualify for affordable health insurance in North Carolina, because they're in what's called "the coverage gap:" They don't earn enough to qualify for a subsidy under the health law, and they can't get Medicaid because North Carolina is one of the 23 states that decided not to expand the program under the health law. The expansion covers childless, low-income adults who previously didn't get qualify for Medicaid. "I take someone who's working poor, I ask them to come see me, and then I find out that not only are they poor, but they're too poor for me to help. It's almost as if I wished I hadn't seen them," says Buckner, who grew up in the area." Jenny Gold in Kaiser Health News.