Court Sides with Voters, Thwarts GOP Plan to Stop Working People from Getting Health Care
Despite attempts by state Republicans to block it, more than 275,000 working Missourians are eligible to receive health care through the state’s Medicaid program, the state supreme court has ruled.
Last summer, 53 percent of Missouri voters supported a constitutional amendment to expand the state’s Medicaid program, part of the Affordable Care Act. That expansion was supposed to go into effect at the beginning of July 2021. But the state’s legislature refused to appropriate funds for it—even though the federal government will cover 90 percent of the costs—and the Republican governor, Mike Parson, withdrew the state’s federal application for the expansion.
But thanks to a unanimous ruling by the Missouri Supreme court on Thursday, which overturned a lower court ruling, the legislature now has to fund the expansion of the state’s Medicaid program, MO HealthNet. In a “per curiam” opinion, meaning it was not authored by a specific judge, the court wrote that the expansion was “valid and now in effect.”
The Medicaid expansion will apply to adults between 19 and 65 in households earning 138 percent of the federal poverty level or less—approximately $18,000 per year for a single adult and $36,570 for a family of four. Without the expansion, Missouri’s Medicaid eligibility requirements were more exclusionary than anywhere else in the U.S., where a family of three making more than $4,600 a year — above 21 percent of poverty level — would not qualify.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/court-sides-with-voters-thwarts-gop-plan-to-stop-working-people-from-getting-health-care/ar-AAMuzUm
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