9 million Americans to be shut out of Medicaid under revamped Obamacare. It’s that civil war thing.

So. About that Obamacare/ACA that SCOTUS said was constitutional. Do you remember hearing that expanding Medicaid would be optional for each state under Obamacare as SCOTUS approved it?

Since Thursday’s decision, a handful of writers have looked into this including blogger and philosopher Paul Kelleher, Michael Cooper of NYTimes, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, and Dave Dayen of FDL.

Dave Dayen: “I keep seeing these confident predictions from health care experts that no state would be so foolish as to reject the Medicaid expansion for their state. I want to set up a poker game with these people, to provide for my family in retirement”

He estimates that over 9 million Americans will be shut out by Republican governors of the 26 states which participated in the lawsuit against Obamacare. And as they refuse to expand Medicaid the individuals shut out will “be frozen in amber in a cruel, pre-ACA health care system, where their only recourse is the emergency room or free clinics like Remote Area Medical.”

I heard Nancy Pelosi on Thursday say that we need not worry because the 1st three years of the Medicaid expansion is essentially free to states and following the federal government picks up roughly 90% of the tab and “Once this bill is rolling and people experience benefits of it, it’s very hard for a state to say [no].”

Such a glib summary, I thought. Has she heard of a guy named Scott Walker?

I really like Dayen’s explanation for why Pelosi is too much the Pollyana so here it is:
“Pelosi’s response strikes me as the typical Democratic dismissal of conservative ideological intransigence. This is a far more conservative era than 1965. These state governors are well to the right of the crop that held out in Arizona [Arizona held out for 17 years becoming the last to create their own voluntary Medicaid program for their state]. And Obamacare is seen as the devil’s handiwork. I’d argue that these governors are ideologically far to the right of even 2009, when all of them took stimulus money eventually. The resisters just paid lip service and eventually took the funds. But there wasn’t a Tea Party to pressure them to the right on these grounds. Scott Walker and Rick Scott and John Kasich came right into office and denied the high speed rail funds for Wisconsin and Florida and Ohio, for example. That’s the crop we’re talking about.”-source

Why won’t Pelosi deal with reality as at least some of us can see it? Is she trying to use a Jedi mind trick on you? Or is she not wanting to harsh your lefty mellow so soon?

More from Dayen from the article Medicaid Expansion Rejection Would Particularly Impact People of Color:

“I was just on a conference call where Governor Martin O’Malley (D-MD) was asked whether he thought Republican governors might opt out of the Medicaid expansion in light of the Supreme Court’s ACA ruling yesterday. He replied, “I don’t know. Some of our colleagues would like to get out of being members of the Union.””

There you go. It’s the new civil war.

Just as you suspected, this healthcare sliver of the much larger civil war hits non-white people hard:

“For people of color, the impact of the mess that the court just rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue and out into the country cannot be understated. Blacks, Latinos and Asians are up to three times less likely to have insurance than whites. Half of the nation’s uninsured are people of color.” – source

The poorest of America aren’t completely without a lobby. The American Hospital Association will lobby states to cover the poorest with Medicaid under the revamped Obamacare BECAUSE hospitals will be left footing the bill when the 9 million come to their emergency rooms.

As for the Democratic Party, I’ll let you suggest how they might turn their rubber spatulas into something sharper for the ongoing knife fight — that Pelosi denies is going on.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2012 at 2:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.