CREDIT: AP IMAGES
Conservative advocates
funded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch have launched a massive campaign pressuring
states to deny health care coverage to lower income Americans through the
Medicaid expansion contained in the Affordable Care Act.
The effort, orchestrated by
the group Americans for Prosperity, is targeting lawmakers in Virginia tasked
with deciding whether the state should accept federal dollars to provide
insurance to individuals and families below 133 percent of the federal poverty
line ($31,321 in income for a
family of four). Volunteers with the organization are distributing flyers
through door-to-door canvassing, attending committee
hearings, and according to one lawmakers who has become a target of the
campaign, intimidating constituents.
As many as 400,000
Virginians could qualify for coverage if the state expands the Medicaid
program, but AFP is warning Virginians
that the system “will cost Virginia taxpayers billions,” require “future tax
hikes and budget cuts to vital services like schools, police and fire
departments,” undermine the “doctor-patient relationship,” increase wait times
and even endanger lives. “Medicaid patients are almost twice as likely to die
during surgery than individuals with private insurance,” the group writes on
its website.
Under the Affordable Care
Act, the federal government will pick up 100 percent of the cost of growing the
program from 2014 to 2016 and states would contribute 10 percent thereafter.
Analysis from the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis in Richmond finds
that “net savings from Medicaid expansion would average about $135 million per year in the
upcoming budget cycle” since expanding Medicaid “would allow the state to use
federal funds instead of state dollars for these programs that already provide
care to the uninsured in Virginia.”
Seventy-six percent of
Virginia doctors treat new Medicaid patients, and the “share of doctors
accepting new Medicaid patients is nearly the same as the
share who are accepting new patients with private insurance or Medicare,” the
Institute reports. While Medicaid beneficiaries tend to be less healthy than the
general uninsured population, people who do enroll in the program “are 25
percent more likely to report that their health is ‘good’ or ‘excellent.’”
The GOP’s refusal to fully
implement the Affordable Care Act will leave more than half of the nation’s uninsured
working poor, approximately 8 million people, without access to health
insurance. The 26 GOP-controlled states not participating in the law’s Medicaid
expansion are home to a disproportionate share of
low-income Americans who aren’t poor enough to qualify for the existing
Medicaid program and make too much to be eligible for subsidies in the ACA’s
insurance marketplaces.
Americans for Prosperity
has spent millions “in
states around the country, including Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana,
Michigan and Pennsylvania, to run the kind of aggressive campaign that it is
now waging here in Virginia, where much will depend on the governor’s race,”
the New York Times notes. Democrat Terry McAuliffe favors expansion, while his
Republican opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, does not. The Virginia panel weighing in
on the matter will decide the question after the Nov. 5 election.
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