Medicaid Expansion Is Not An Exercise In Statistics

Real people are affected by Republicans' refusal to expand Medicaid in 25 states, leaving millions in the Obamacare coverage gap where they have no insurance and should be covered by federal government funds. But Republicans hate Obama more than they care about poor unisured people, so they get screwed.

And sometimes, as a direct result of lack of coverage, they die.

Charlene Dill, a 32-year-old mother of three, collapsed and died on a stranger’s floor at the end of March. She was at an appointment to try to sell a vacuum cleaner, one of the three part-time jobs that she worked to try to make ends meet for her family. Her death was a result of a documented heart condition — and it could have been prevented.

Dill was uninsured, and she went years without the care she needed to address her chronic conditions because she couldn’t afford it.
Under the health reform law, which seeks to expand coverage to millions of low-income Americans, Dill wasn’t supposed to lack insurance. She was supposed to have access to a public health plan through the law’s expansion of the Medicaid program. But Dill, a Florida resident, is one of the millions of Americans living in a state that has refused to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion after the Supreme Court ruled this provision to be optional. Those low-income people have been left in a coverage gap, making too much income to qualify for a public Medicaid plan but too little income to qualify for the federal subsidies to buy a plan on Obamacare’s private exchanges.

Florida has one of the highest uninsurance rates in the nation, and is home to a disproportionately large number of residents who struggle to afford health services. Nonetheless, lawmakers have continued to resist accepting generous federal funds to expand Medicaid to an estimated 750,000 low-income Floridians like Dill.

So she could have gotten help.  She babysat, she sold vacuum cleaners, she cleaned houses to try to earn enough for her and her three kids.  Friends tried to raise money for her heart meds, now instead they are raising money for her funeral.  Now those three kids don't have a mother because Republicans in Florida hate Obama.

Think about that for a while.