Medicaid Refusals Create New Mason-Dixon Line

[Scuba]

http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/07/188209/medicaid-refusals-create-new-mason-dixon-line

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent refusal to pull health-care subsidies from some 6.4 million Americans over some imprecise wording in the Affordable Care Act was a mercy. But health care remains a stark and shameful instance of the nation’s failure to overcome persistent racial disparities.

That owes in part to an earlier Supreme Court ruling. Originally, the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion was supposed to be implemented across the board, in every state. But the high court gave states the option of rejecting the expansion. This led to the shocking coverage gap we have today.

As of the beginning of this year, 3.8 million low-income adults lacked health insurance as a result of these rejections. These are people with incomes too high for their states’ regular Medicaid programs but too low to qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies for private coverage.

Those pushed beyond the health care margins are disproportionately people of color. The Kaiser Family Fund has calculated that 27 percent of the uninsured are African-American and 24 percent are Latino. Most of these people live in states of the Old Confederacy.

More at the link.

[Historic NY]

1. Confederacy still on the wrong side of history...

their leaders have become the carpetbaggers they despised.

[brer cat]

2. The confederacy has grown much bigger

if we accept your reasoning. I would say it has to do with republicans dominating state government, which is not the same thing.

[AZ Progressive]

4. Someone needs to make a documentary showing the cruelty of these states and the unnecessary victims

of them.

[brer cat]

6. I agree.

It is one of the cruelest, most heartless, and totally unnecessary acts of the rw in a very long time. How anyone can deny healthcare to the poor, especially children, just to score a cheap political shot is beyond my ability to imagine. It takes a total lowlife to allow innocent people to suffer and die just because of the skin color of the person in the WH.

[I_Like_Hammers]

3. And who do the RW people here (the South) blame for it?

Obama, of course.

[brer cat]

7. Welcome to DU.

You will find many other liberal Georgia folks here.

[Phentex]

5. Looks like a very crooked line to me...