Missouri voters this week approved Medicaid expansion by a 53% to 47% margin, making the conservative state the seventh to do so under Trump. The Republican president readily carried Missouri in 2016, but the Medicaid vote comes as more people have been losing workplace health insurance in a treacherous coronavirus economy.
That leaves only a dozen states opposed to using the federal-state health program for low-income people as a vehicle for covering more adults, mainly people in jobs that don’t provide health care. Medicaid expansion is a central feature of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, covering about 12 million people, while nearly 10 million others get subsidized private insurance.
If present trends continue, it’s only a matter of time until all states expand Medicaid, acknowledged Brian Blase, a former health care adviser in the Trump White House, who remains opposed to the expansion.
“Medicaid expansion is terrible policy, but it is attractive to states because it’s almost all federal spending and the insurance companies and hospitals get lots of dollars when a state expands Medicaid,” he said.
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