Is a Medicaid Turnabout Coming to the Deep South?

[yallerdawg]

An election in Louisiana and a surprising recommendation from an Alabama task force are the latest cracks in red-state resistance to insuring the poor.

Source: The Nation, by Zoë Carpenter

Gerald Dial, a Republican state senator from Alabama, expressed something of an unlikely opinion last week. “Somebody is going to have to pay some more taxes,” Dial said, so that Alabama can boost health insurance coverage for the poor.

Alabama is one of 20 states that have refused to accept federal money to expand their Medicaid programs through the Affordable Care Act. That’s left more than 3 million people across the country, including at least 185,000 Alabamans, stranded in a coverage gap—not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but too poor to afford insurance on their own. A disproportionate number of those are people of color, and they’re concentrated in Southern states.

But in a few parts of the Deep South, ideological pettiness is starting to give way to practical considerations. Dial’s comments came at the final meeting of a task force appointed by Governor Robert Bentley to study the state’s health challenges, which, to put it mildly, are daunting. Alabama ranks near the bottom of the country in rates of diabetes, sexually transmitted infections, infant mortality, and premature death. More than 13 percent of the population is uninsured, in part because the state has a stringent limit for Medicaid eligibility: parents making over 18 percent of the poverty level, or $3,616 for a family of three, don’t qualify.

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The other bright spot is Louisiana, where Democratic State Representative John Bel Edwards trounced Republican David Vitter in the governor’s race Saturday. Edwards immediately promised that expanding Medicaid will be “among the highest priorities” of his administration. The state legislature passed a financing plan earlier this year that should allow him to do so. That would take more than 220,000 Louisianans off the list of the needlessly uninsured.

More at: http://www.thenation.com/article/is-a-medicaid-turnabout-coming-to-the-deep-south/