plan of action - june 26, 2017

Keep Hitting Health Care!


Action:

1. If your state is one of the 32 (including DC) which adopted Medicaid expansion, contact your state governor and ask him/her to speak up loudly and publicly against the GOP health “care” bill, which makes deep cuts into the program. You can see a map of Medicaid expansion states in this Business Insider article. For example, in Pennsylvania, 5,578 out of every 100,000 residents was able to obtain coverage under Medicaid expansion. In other words, 713, 984 Pennsylvanians have gained coverage thanks to Obamacare and Medicaid expansion. The GOP bill, unlike the AHA, puts a per-capita limit on the amount granted to each state to cover patients in the Medicaid expansion program. In addition, Medicaid will no longer keep pace with medical-cost inflation, and the expansion funds will be cut completely by 2024. Many states will see huge numbers of citizens losing coverage.

2. There is no state which receives less than 50% federal funding for its Medicaid program, whether or not it chose to adopt Medicaid expansion. So even die-hard Republican let-em-eat-cake Texas receives 57.5% of its Medicaid funding from the federal government. These states will see a damaging loss of health care when Medicaid is capped. The social cost will be huge. If your state is one of these, please again contact your governor and and ask him/her to speak out against the GOP bill. The third map in this article shows the numbers.

3. The bill does not preserve protections for people with pre-existing conditions. States will be able to waive the essential benefits requirement and will be able to dump less healthy people into higher-cost pools. Contact your senators to complain.

Senate contact info: www.senate.gov
Find your state governor: www.usa.gov/state-governor