GOP To Deny Insurance To Millions In Poverty In 2014

The Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) will start this month (and over 4 million people without insurance have qualified, and will be getting Medicaid now thanks to the new law). This Medicaid expansion will cover those people who made too much money to get Medicaid in their state in the past, but don't make enough to buy their own insurance or qualify for federal subsidies to buy that insurance.

For example, Texas requires a person to make no more than $3,737 and be a parent of dependent children to qualify for Medicaid -- only about 19% of the federal poverty level. If Texas had expanded Medicaid, people making up to 138% of the poverty level would have qualified for Medicaid. But Texas didn't expand Medicaid, which means those people making between 19% of the poverty level and 138% of it will not be able to get health insurance (although there is the possibility that the federal government may offer subsidies to those between 100% and 138% of the poverty level in states like Texas that refuse to expand Medicaid).

And Texas is not the only state refusing to expand Medicaid. At least half of the states, 25 in all, have opted to not expand Medicaid. These are states that are currently being run by Republicans -- Republicans who believe health care is not a right, but a privilege that should be offered only to those affluent enough to pay for it. For them, their hard-hearted ideology is more important than the lives of the poor and disadvantaged citizens in their states who will be unable to access life-saving preventative care.

The only option left for these people is to wait until they are sick enough to go to the emergency room -- and for thousands each year, that is too late because their disease will have progressed too far to be treated. In plain language, these Republican state governments have sentenced them to death.

And this is not a small number of people who are being denied health insurance (and thus access to adequate health care). It is about 4.8 million people in those 25 states combined. Five of those states contain 59% of those people denied insurance (and the other 20 states contain the other 41%). The five worst offenders are:

Texas (22%) -- 1,046,430
Florida (16%) -- 763,890
Georgia (8%) -- 409,350
North Carolina (7%) -- 318,710
Pennsylvania (6%) -- 281,290

All of these 25 states should be ashamed of themselves. The federal government will be paying ALL of the additional expense of expanding Medicaid for the next 10 years, and will continue to pay 90% of the cost after that. That means these states could afford to cover their poor and disadvantaged citizens with Medicaid. They just don't want to -- because they don't care for those citizens, and they think they can get some political advantage by refusing to expand Medicaid.

Making matters even worse is the fact that most new jobs that are being created are low-wage jobs -- jobs that pay too much to qualify for Medicaid in these states, but not enough to qualify for a federal subsidy to buy insurance. And these same Republicans want to keep the minimum wage low. They see nothing wrong with paying people a poverty wage, and then denying them health insurance.

(The charts above are from the website of the Kaiser Foundation.)