Medicaid expansion working in Republican and Democratic states

Winston-Salem Journal editorial ~ echo 

“Claims are not well founded that Medicaid expansion will cost states considerably more than what objective analysts project,” Mark Hall, a law and public health professor at Wake Forest University, said in a recently completed study, the Journal’s Richard Craver reported on Tuesday.

“Objective analysts” is a phrase that seems to have been missing as the Republican-led state legislature rejected opportunities to expand Medicaid, beginning in 2009.

“Instead,” Hall continues, “those claims are based on sources that are either incomplete, inaccurate, misleading, or out of date in various ways.”

Hall’s study is titled “Do states regret expanding Medicaid?” Spoiler alert: the answer is “no.”

Several red states were also reluctant at first, but over time, they have come around, including some with Republican governors or legislatures, like Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, North Dakota and New Hampshire, according to Hall’s report. They express a desire to continue with the program.

N.C. state legislators have resisted calls to expand Medicaid coverage with federal funding initiatives since the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, first offered to pay 90 percent of the costs for the program. Their excuse was that they couldn’t count on the federal government to pay its large portion of the cost.

But that claim seemed dubious from the start. The federal government isn’t known for skipping out on its bills. Many suspected that legislators were motivated more by their reluctance to cooperate with President Obama or let the ACA gain a foothold.

Even if their concern were legitimate, with five years of data on which to draw, Hall writes, “The strong balance of objective evidence indicates that actual costs to states so far from expanding Medicaid are negligible or minor, and that states across the political spectrum do not regret their decisions to expand Medicaid.”

Medicaid enrollment in North Carolina is projected to be at 2.14 million by June 30, representing about 21 percent of the state population, according to a N.C. Department of Health and Human Services report. Another 500,000 North Carolinians could become eligible, if legislators finally dropped their recalcitrance and agreed.

North Carolina has given up billions of federal dollars that could have been used to improve and maintain the health of low-income residents. Gov. Roy Cooper and health-care advocates have urged the legislature for years to expand the program to help the eligible who otherwise have no access to health-care coverage. 

There’s no acceptable reason not to do so now.