Three of the states that have benefitted the most from Obamacare and from Medicaid expansion voted last night for the people who want to take those gains away. Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia—states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance—all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance. Theres this quote in this story, from a report from Kentucky about how Medicaid expansion was working in the state, but still failing politically: Born and raised Republican, Robin Evans, an eBay warehouse packer who was grateful for new Medicaid coverage, said of herself. I aint planning on changing now. We dont know if Evans actually voted on Tuesday. We do know that Alison Lundergan Grimes didnt give her a reason to vote Democratic. Because she was so busy tiptoeing around the idea that she was actually a Democrat that she refused to make the obvious case: this one Democratic law made a profound difference in individual lives in her state. Lots of lives. Robin Evans life. Arkansas? West Virginia? Every day should have included Mark Pryor and Natalie Tennant going to the doors of new Medicaid recipients and taking credit for it. Every other ad on television should have been about how local hospitals were saved because of it. Because Democrats did it. That would have been a pretty good start in changing peoples minds and maybe, just maybe, getting them to a polling booth. The very dim bright spot now is that all these newly elected Republicans have vowed to stop Obamacare. Now theyre on the hook for deciding whether to fulfill that promise and take health care away from their constituents or not.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 21:37:09 +0000