13 Governors Screwing Over the Uninsured. Meet the Republicans rejecting Medicaid expansion in their states.
Thirteen state governors are refusing to implement Medicaid expansion, despite the fact that it's being offered with cherries on top: The Affordable Care Act's timeline guarantees that the federal government would pay for 100 percent of the expansion in its first three years, tapering down to 90 percent of the paycheck by 2020. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report [3], expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income groups hovering above the federal poverty line in all states would cut the number of uninsured by nearly half nationwide, provided other features of the ACA are implemented.As long as you're a zygote, conservatives will even gun down doctors to save you. Once you're a human being, they want you to drop dead and decease the surplus population.
Most of these governors argue the expansion would be too expensive, even though including the poor would only increase these states' Medicaid spending by an average of 3 percent over the next decade, and taxpayers will be paying for the federal program anyway [4]. Several of the governors rejecting Medicaid expansion ran for office on anti-Obamacare or Tea Party platforms, preaching austerity and less federal meddling. Maine's Governor Paul LePage, whose state would actually see its portion of Medicaid spending reduced by expanding the program, argued that Maine would not be "complicit in the degradation" of the country's health care.
Not all GOP governors are rejecting Medicaid expansion—earlier this month, Michigan's Rick Snyder and Ohio's John Kasich agreed to let newly eligible groups onto their Medicaid rolls, joining GOP governors from Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Dakota who support the program's expansion. Pressure for other governors to concede is mounting—even Florida governor Rick Scott now appears [5] to be keeping the state's options open. Here are the players still holding out:
