Earlier this month, a special task force appointed by Alabama’s staunchly conservative governor recommended unanimously that the state drop its opposition to Medicaid expansion. Its refusal to do so “makes insurance inaccessible to hundreds of thousands of Alabamians and places our entire health care infrastructure in financial jeopardy.”
“Across the country, in every region and in some very conservative political environments, states are finding that local reform to Medicaid helps working families, local economies and state budgets,” the task force reported, noting that the majority of those helped by expansion would be working people whose employers are unable or unwilling to provide insurance through the workplace.
“They’re the folks who keep things going — the people who serve our food at restaurants, bag our groceries, patch our roofs and repair our cars.”
And just to put things into context, Alabama has the 13th highest rate of uninsured in the country, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Georgia ranks second.
A few more highlights from the Alabama report:
- Medicaid expansion would save the lives of as many as 562 Alabama citizens annually while improving health outcomes and workplace productivity for tens of thousands more.
- It would bring $1.7 billion a year in federal money for the state's highly stressed health-care system, particularly in rural areas, creating thousands of jobs and aiding in economic development.
- It is affordable. In fact, the task force found, "Closing the coverage gap has been a net gain for other states, where savings from elsewhere in the state budget, combined with increased revenues, have far exceeded the state cost of this redesign."
- "Respect for veterans is a point of pride, yet an estimated 18,000 veterans and their spouses are being denied the Medicaid coverage they could receive in other states."
The bottom line? “Redesigning coverage for our neighbors without insurance, for less than a dime on the dollar, is a bargain Alabama can’t pass up.”
None of this should come as a surprise. The logic, arithmetic and economics in favor of expansion have been overwhelming from the beginning, as have the humanitarian aspects. Only the politics of the situation have argued against expansion, but even that is now changing, not just in Alabama but throughout the South.
In deep-red Louisiana, the newly elected Democratic governor has pledged to accept Medicaid expansion. In Kentucky, a newly elected Republican governor who ran on a platform of repealing Medicaid expansion is now backpedaling from that promise. The same has been true in Arkansas, which cut its uninsured rate in half and is unwilling to undo that progress.
Even in Washington, where Republicans now control 54 seats in the U.S. Senate, party leaders have been unable to gin up 51 votes in favor of Medicaid repeal. It seems that GOP senators in more than a half-dozen states may be balking at a vote that would strip insurance from millions of their constituents.
And Georgia? As much as I might hope otherwise, I suspect the uncompromising, “Fergit, Hell” spirit regarding Obamacare still has too strong a grip on our state legislators. Being proved wrong is all the reason they need to stay wrong.
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