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.
“How can somebody in poverty not be eligible for subsidies?” an unemployed health care worker in Virginia asked through tears. The woman, who identified herself only as Robin L. because she does not want potential employers to know she is down on her luck, thought she had run into a computer problem when she went online Tuesday and learned she would not qualify.
At 55, she has high blood pressure, and she had been waiting for the law to take effect so she could get coverage. Before she lost her job and her house and had to move in with her brother in Virginia, she lived in Maryland, a state that is expanding Medicaid. “Would I go back there?” she asked. “It might involve me living in my car. I don’t know. I might consider it.”
The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.
Left behind
The Republicans figure that these folks are already so poor that they won’t notice. And anyway they don’t vote. Here’s an interesting fact: Only 10 counties in the US account for 100% of the death penalty convictions. Do you want to take a guess as to where those 10 counties are located? Republicans always blame the victims. That’s Republican dogma. They claim that if you’re poor it’s because you’re too lazy or too stupid or too whatever to get ahead. What they would like to say is “too bad, so sad for you because I’ve got mine.”
Yes, Imho. But after these Republicans all get raptured the poor will get their stuff for free!
Here’s an interesting fact: Only 10 counties in the US account for 100% of the death penalty convictions.
This is hard to believe.
Which counties are those?
How many convictions in each of them, and what’s the national total?
(There are roughly 3,000 counties in the US.)