Americans are rushing to sign up for Obamacare this week, causing the servers to overload and the sites to crash. But for one group of Americans—the working poor in a number of red states—the enrollment process is just another thing for them to be left out of. As reported in the New York Times, in states that have rejected Medicaid expansion, millions of working poor people are finding themselves unable to get either private insurance or Medicaid. The law as originally written covered these citizens, but a Supreme Court decision allowing states to opt out of Medicaid expansion is being exploited by Republicans who want to keep as many people as humanly possible off Obamacare during this last-stand attempt to derail the health care legislation.
This is 100 percent the fault of Republicans. After the Supreme Court gave states the right to opt out, it was Republican governors and state legislatures that made the choice to opt out. Not surprisingly, as the New York Times notes, single moms and black Americans are being hit hardest:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/10/03/millions_of_working_poor_left_out_of_obamacare_how_long_can_republicans.html
and here:
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.
Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.
Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.
People shopping for insurance on the health exchanges are already discovering this bitter twist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/health/millions-of-poor-are-left-uncovered-by-health-law.html?ref=politics&_r=1&
Also in the interview last week with Presidents Obama and Clinton they both discussed this problem that the republicans and the supreme court have caused.
= new reply since forum marked as read
