Tag: health care

Medicaid’s “tremendous impact”

July 13, 2012 at 10:01 amCategory:Uncategorized

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Believe it or not, I agree with Pat McCrory. Completely.

At a campaign stop on Wednesday, gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory joined  the likes of Texas Governor Rick Perry and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in pledging not to implement the two most important part of the Affordable Care Act: state health exchanges and the Medicaid expansion.

His reason for opposing the Medicaid expansion provision? He’s afraid it will have a “tremendous impact on our Medicaid in North Carolina.”

Yes Pat, of course it will have a tremendous impact – that’s the point.

Presumably, what Mr. McCrory meant to say was that the expansion would have a negative fiscal impact on the state, ala the claims of other Southern Republican Governors in recent days. He would, alas, be as wrong as everyone else who makes this claim. Read More…

ACA’s Medicaid expansion: A great deal for the states

July 13, 2012 at 7:07 amCategory:Uncategorized

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The experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have more hard and compelling numbers on the facts surrounding the inexplicably controversial Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act.

The takeaway: North Carolina (and all other states) would be foolish not to participate.

Consider the following:

  • The federal government will pick up nearly 93 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion over its first nine years (2014-2022), according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
  • States will spend just 2.8 percent more on Medicaid with the expansion than they would have without health reform, CBO finds.
  • This 2.8 percent figure overstates the net impact on state budgets because it doesn’t reflect the large savings Read More…

Things we’ll lose, things we won’t get if health care reform is repealed

July 11, 2012 at 4:01 pmCategory:Uncategorized

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Shannon Spillane of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has two excellent posts in which she spells out, respectively, four things we will lose and four things we won’t achieve if health care reform is somehow repealed. And here’s a graph that from the second post that makes the stakes very plain, indeed. 

  

Health reform’s Medicaid expansion a very good deal for states

June 28, 2012 at 4:43 pmCategory:Uncategorized

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(Cross-posted from Off the Charts, the blog of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) 

By Judy Solomon

Today’s Supreme Court decision essentially means that states can decide whether or not to expand their Medicaid programs to cover low-income adults.  The typical (or median) state only covers working parents who make less than 63 percent of the poverty line ($12,790 a year for a family of three) and non-working parents with incomes below 37 percent of the poverty line ($7,063 a year).  Only a handful of states provide coverage to any low-income adults without dependent children, regardless of how far below the poverty line they fall.  The Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act would cover these poor and low-income adults by expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty line ($25,390 for a family of three).  CBO assumed an additional 17 million adults would receive Medicaid coverage by 2022, as a result.

The Medicaid expansion is a very good deal for states: Read More…

Even Republicans still like most of what’s in health care reform law

June 25, 2012 at 3:30 pmCategory:Uncategorized

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(Cross-posted from The Maddow Blog)

By Steve Benen

I saw a familiar headline over the weekend: “Most Americans oppose health law but like provisions.” It’s been the only consistent trend when it comes to polling on the Affordable Care Act: the public has been conditioned to reject “Obamacare,” but Americans don’t really know what’s in it. When asked about the provisions of the law, however, they’re quite popular.

That was the case in 2009, 2010, and 2011. And the new Reuters-Ipsos poll suggests nothing has changed.

In this case, Greg Sargent obtained the poll internals and found, “What’s particularly interesting about this poll is that solid majorities of Republicans favor most of the law’s main provisions, too.”

Read the rest of the post by clicking here.