While the White House Press Corps asks the president about his gaffes, failures, and poll numbers, he’s quietly succeeding behind the scenes where the beltway media dare not look.
About 1.7 million poor Americans looking for health coverage were deemed eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in November, according to new government data released on Friday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) also revised previous estimates that about 1.5 million people qualified for Medicaid or CHIP in October up to 2.1 million. All told, that means that just under four million low-income Americans now have access to public health insurance.
Four million.
That number would be far higher if Rick Perry’s Texas or Scott Walker’s Wisconsin participated in the expansion.
I imagine that refusing to expand Medicaid will be a litmus test for 2016 hopefuls which they will have to rationalize to the millions of people they’re denying healthcare to. They won’t have the Mitt Romney defense of “it works for my state but not your state” to fall back on.