Poor Tom. It’s all about him, and nobody else:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Advocates for the poor and uninsured gathered Tuesday in the Pennsylvania Capitol to throw Gov. Tom Corbett’s words back at him after he warned that he was at his “breaking point” over the federal government’s apparent resistance to conditions he wants before accepting billions of Medicaid expansion dollars.
Rather, they said, it is the uninsured who are their breaking point because they do not have access to the government-funded health insurance program that Corbett has thus far refused to expand.
Last week, Corbett told reporters that he was frustrated over talks with the Obama administration and suggested repeatedly that he was getting to his “breaking point.”
“That would be a good thing if he was going to help us,” said Carmela Green, a 51-year-old home health care worker from Williamsport who said she and her husband fall into a gap in President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law that was supposed to be filled by the Medicaid expansion.
The Greens’ income falls short of the threshold of about $15,500 for a couple to qualify for partially subsidized private insurance under the law. Yet they also cannot get access to the broader Medicaid coverage envisioned by the 2010 law because Corbett has opposed the expansion in Pennsylvania, unless he secures certain changes in the federal-state program.
Thus far, half the states, including every neighbor to Pennsylvania, have embraced a Medicaid expansion of some sort.
“Pennsylvania is now an island of the uninsured,” Antoinette Kraus, executive director of the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, told the rally in the Capitol.
Hopefully, Tom’s going down with the ship:
PENNSYLVANIA — Today, a new set of polling data released by Public Policy Polling (PPP) and commissioned by MoveOn.org Political Action shows Governor Tom Corbett (R-PA) trailing a generic Democratic candidate 34% to 56%. The poll indicates that Governor Corbett’s failure to expand Medicaid in Pennsylvania could hurt him, and other Pennsylvania Republicans, electorally in 2014.
“Around the country, and in every state, voters strongly support expanding Medicaid to millions of people currently without access to affordable health care,” said Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action. “If Republicans stopped standing between hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians and Medicaid, families could immediately gain access to the health care that they desperately need, while saving the state money in the long run. Come Election Day, voters will punish Republicans for playing politics with people’s lives and reward Democrats who aggressively support the expansion of Medicaid.”
The survey, conducted April 1-3, found that 59% of Pennsylvania voters think the state should accept federal Medicaid expansion dollars, and 46% of voters said they were less likely to vote for Governor Corbett as a result of his position on Medicaid expansion. Governor Corbett’s failure to accept Medicaid expansion funds for Pennsylvania has left more than 281,000 people in the state without access to affordable health care.
