Top of a good list

Most of the time West Virginia is at the bottom of the good lists and the top of the bad ones. It's always nice when that pattern reverses itself.

That's actually happened several times:

*we're a national leader in insuring children via CHIP and Medicaid;

*we're the national leader in school breakfast participation and school food generally;

*thanks to Medicaid expansion, in 2016, we had the largest drop in the number of the uninsured.

Here's the latest positive news from the Georgetown Center for Children and Families: while maternal mortality has gone up in the US as a whole (alone among advanced capitalist nations), maternal and infant help has improved considerably here in recent years the number of uninsured women of childbearing age has dropped by more than two-thirds here.

The main reason? No surprise, it's Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. In fact, the report found that "States that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act saw a 50 percent greater reduction in infant mortality than non-expansion states."

It's possible that WV's numbers could even further improve due to the recent decision of the legislature to extend Medicaid coverage for pregnant women to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, as noted here.

All of which is one more reason to protect Medicaid expansion.