When The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010, it came with mandated Medicaid expansion to the states.
When the Roberts Court “upheld” the act just last year on June 28, 2013, they threw out the mandated Medicaid expansion portion of the bill, essentially rewriting the healthcare insurance reform law passed by Congress and signed into law by the duly-elected president on a voter mandate to do so. The Supreme Court basically knocked A.C.A.’s teeth out and handed it a corn on the cob.
This was a sort of compromise that took place in the high court, where they took workable law and exposed its vulnerable neck to professional hangmen.
You just can’t rewrite a law of this magnitude– incapacitating an all-encompassing provision– and still demand the president provide a smooth transition to a fully-functioning law. Some of us were gasping at the time. I distinctly recall gasping.
That was a huge setback, not insurmountable, but a significant roadblock in the fog of poor media reporting and public understanding. And maybe the layperson really couldn’t appreciate the lies that were to come, the constant, repetitive slander that it’s a “train wreck!” and a “failure” and just execute it! before it even reached for its Bad Motherfucker.
These people could make a rubber plant cry with their constant derision and verbal abuse.
So, Republicans, despite plunging the country into chaos on the front and back ends of this presidency, wasting billions and billions of dollars almost overnight and putting innocent people in great distress, or a Duck & Cover economy, have made their rhetorical getaway through the debt ceiling and on to the roof to an awaiting chopper that was never needed. Bravo, media. Bravo, concern trolls. You are the Delta Force for Right wing terrorists. Collect your Medal of Apathy when you turn in your 3-D glasses.
As of October 22, these 25 states have decided to delay the inevitable, and take their time coming around while people go uninsured and led to believe it is Obamacare that caused this senseless lock-out and shitty website and the Regime’s death panels are real!
States had a lot of leeway under the law to determine their own healthcare insurance funding destinies, and could have alleviated the burden and the blame of the federal government. But that’s not how they chose to play. Oh, it’s a vicious game, now.
So, as a public service, for some perspective that it sorely lacking in the current public debate, here are the states that continue not to care whether you die unnecessarily in a pile of medical bills, and who have been forcing the government to scramble to adapt by order of appearance in Satan’s ledger:
Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The Fuck-You States of America.