North Carolina took a giant step today in the right direction. Their state legislature finalized a bill to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to otherwise ineligible people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. It is estimated that this will benefit around 600,000 people.
But it's not just about health coverage. The expansion will bring in millions of federal dollars, create jobs, keep rural hospitals open, help people recover from Substance Use Disorder and all kinds of other good stuff.
By my count--and counting has never been my strong suit--North Carolina is the 41st state, including DC, to take this step. It's especially important that this happened in a southern state. Let's just say that if one was drawing a Venn diagram of states that resisted expansion with states that belonged to the Confederacy there is considerable overlap. At the risk of extreme understatement, this might not be entirely coincidental. But every time this happens, it puts more pressure on the holdouts to do the right thing.
A little review: Medicaid expansion was intended for all states and DC when the ACA was passed in 2010. A 2012 US Supreme Court decision upheld the constitutionality of it, but made expansion a state decision. Depending on the state, the decision could be made by ballot measure, executive decision, or legislation, which is always more complicated.
We were lucky that West Virginia's decision was made before the state turned into a ________ (you can fill in the blank) by my favorite all time governor, Earl Ray Tomblin. The state agency in charge did a fantastic job of signing people up. Lots of people I know worked really hard to make sure that happened. I'm not sure of the current enrollment numbers, but at times it has come close to 200,000 adults in a state with a population of 1.8 million, more or less.
However, we had to spend a lot of years defending it, especially during the Orange Epoch, when the late Senator John McCain, to his great credit, stopped efforts to repeal it in the senate. West Virginia was in the hot seat then too, with a conservative Democrat and a fairly moderate Republican in the persons of Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito. Manchin took a "fix not nix" approach and Capito said that she "didn't go to Washington to hurt people."
Then there were state legislative efforts by out of state groups like ALEC and the Foundation for Government Accountability to impose bureaucratic hoops and reporting requirements designed to cut people off as recent as this year, which were fortunately defeated. It also was a huge relief when the US Supreme Court (!) effectively squelched efforts to undo the law in 2021.
I imagine folks in North Carolina will have to be vigilant on the enrollment process and ready to defend the expansion when efforts are made to weaken it. But it's still a great day.
Next stop...maybe Alabama? Sometimes the domino theory has its moments.
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