Medicaid growth creates gap of 5M with no coverage

Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa.

About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America.

They make up a coverage gap in President Barack Obama’s signature health care law created by the domino effects of last year’s Supreme Court ruling and states’ subsequent policy decisions.

The court effectively left it up to states to decide whether to open Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled, to more people, primarily poor working adults without children.

Twenty-five states declined. That leaves 4.8 million people in those states without the health care coverage that their peers elsewhere are getting through the expansion of Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. More than one-fifth of them live in Texas alone, Kaiser’s analysis found.

The Medicaid expansion was supposed to work hand-in-hand with tax credits subsidizing private insurance for people with slightly higher incomes, two keys to the law’s broader aim of extending health insurance to 30 million more people. As an enticement for states to expand Medicaid, the federal government promises to pay nearly all of the cost.

Without the expansion, the law is unable to help people who are below the income threshold where tax credits start kicking in, about $11,500 for working adults.