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You are here: Home / Anderson On Health Insurance / Good news everybody

Good news everybody

by | 58 Comments

This post is in: 

I’m a bit late to this but there is some good news from early in the week:

In April, Montana’s Republican legislatureapproved Medicaid expansion, but like other Republican-controlled states, it made some changes to put a conservative twist on the program.

The Obama administration needed to approve those changes, which include making beneficiaries pay premiums up to 2 percent of their income, and on Monday it signed off.

“This agreement will bring much needed access to healthcare coverage to more than 70,000 low-income Montanans,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in a statement.

Montana expanded Medicaid and the expansion is in place for January 1, 2016 coverage.  Alaska went live with their expansion on September 1, 2015.  So the hold-out states are Maine, the Confederacy and the Mountain West and the Plains.

 

 

 

Reader Interactions

58Comments

  6. 6.

    benw

    This is good news. Although if KY is any guide, Medicaid expansion will cause the voters to freak out and replace their D governor for a tea party psycho.

  7. 7.

    gene108

    The cynic thinks these more expensive opt out provisions will be used as an excuse to gut Medicaid expansions, when the Feds stop paying 100% because it comes in as too expensive.

  8. 8.

    Spinoza is my Co-pilot

    Believe it or not Arizona (my benighted but so nice and warm adopted home) approved Medicaid expansion quite early. Normally-assholish governor Jan Brewer (of “finger-waving at Obama on the tarmac” fame) actually pushed it through the legislature, for which she (and the leg) were roundly pilloried by the more rabid elements around here (which are legion, obviously). Fairly amazing, all things considered. She’s been replaced by even-worse governor Steve Ducey, but like Obamacare most everywhere it’s unlikely that the expansion is rescinded. My wife has worked in the medical field (in hospitals) for nearly 40 years now, and they are definitely seeing positive effects from Obamacare, whatever nutjob rightwingers might believe.

  9. 9.

    Matt McIrvin

    I think Maine is a matter of time. LePage is term-limited in 2018, and maybe the center-left will get its act together.

  10. 10.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    So the hold-out states are Maine, the Confederacy and the Mountain West and the Plains.

    In other words, most of America.

  11. 11.

    Matt McIrvin

    The thing that freaked me out about that interactive NYT map linked to a while back is that it appears that the health-insurance situation in most of the bad places is actually getting worse year on year, maybe because of rising premiums. In some cases, alarmingly rapidly worse, like the rate of uninsured increasing 10% per year.

    And that’s not just in the states that rejected Medicaid expansion, it’s also in the poor rural areas that have been underserved in some of the expansion states. It may just be a side effect of exploding rural poverty in general.

    There’s an interesting exception: it looked like the heavily African-American rural areas of SC and GA were bad-but-improving.

  13. 13.

    Matt McIrvin

    @CONGRATULATIONS!: 30 states have some form of Medicaid expansion, including New York and California, so I’d be surprised if the rejectors were most of them by population. I was going to say you were right going by land area, but Alaska alone probably negates that.

  18. 18.

    Kelly

    Hi Richard,

    Do you think of the “Estimated total yearly costs” is a reasonable way to chose a plan? We’re a couple in our late 50’s that will just slip into the 250% CSR. It’s our first time on the exchange but thanks to you, Charles Gaba and Andrew Sprung we’re going for the Silver.

  24. 24.

    Felonius Monk

    Not entirely OT. Karoli over at CrooksandLiars has an interesting take on the KY election:

    In order to believe these results as they are right now, we have to believe Democrats split the ticket and voted for Dems everywhere but the Governor’s race. I’m not sure I buy that. … You know what that leaves for me? Voting machines.

  25. 25.

    Geeno

    Is the site complaint thread still alive somewhere? That should probably be pinned to the front page if so.
    My complaint/query is how do you return to where you were in the comment thread after you follow a link up.
    You used to go back a page and it would return you to your previous place in the thread. Now I have scroll all the way back down.

  26. 26.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Felonius Monk: I never in my wildest dream thought that Balloon Juice would be corporatized. The front page looks like a mish-mash of the old Balloon Juice website interspersed with huge logos of social media icons.

    Be the first of your friends to like this?

    Really Balloon Juice, that sounds like some twee fashion blogger.

  28. 28.

    Felonius Monk

    @Geeno: Use the Tab key. I learned this last night after cursing under my breath for a few days. Question remains though, Why change it?

  31. 31.

    Cacti

    @Matt McIrvin:

    30 states have some form of Medicaid expansion, including New York and California, so I’d be surprised if the rejectors were most of them by population. I was going to say you were right going by land area, but Alaska alone probably negates that.

    Most of the largest land area states are onboard: Alaska (1st), California (3rd), Montana (4th), New Mexico (5th), Arizona (6th), Nevada (7th), Colorado (8th), Oregon (9th), Michigan (11th), Minnesota (12th).

    Those 10 account for 45% of the total US land area.

  32. 32.

    vhh

    @CONGRATULATIONS!: Perhaps by territory, but not by population, share of US economic output, or total income. There’s a reason that people from the Northeast and West Coast call it Flyover Country.

  35. 35.

    Satby

    I’ve been reading the site on my Kindle, which now looks the same as it did before our glorious Balloon Juice revolution.
    Let’s me pretend the last few days never happened.

  38. 38.

    Richard Mayhew

    @Kelly: Good question… I think Healthcare.gov and a good number of the state exchange sites have scenario tools in window shopping where you can enter your expected healthcare usage and use that to figure out what is the best cost idea for your situation. If you know you’re looking at multiple surgeries and several high cost drugs next year, a Platinum plan might be a good idea, or if you think it is likely that you’ll be pretty healthy with just primary care visits and low level prescriptions a Silver with cost sharing assistance might work.

    I would recommend that you talk to either a navigator or a broker for some extra assistance.

  43. 43.

    Corner Stone

    @mdblanche: The recent comments section indicated you had posted something so I decided to drop in and reply briefly.
    Now, where was I?

  44. 44.

    Corner Stone

    The complete blank page displayed after you post a comment or hit refresh reminds me of everytime I used to go to the movies. All the commercials and pre-ambles and trailers would finish playing and there was a two or three second gap where the screen was blank, no music was playing and I could never remember what movie I was there to see. I would sit in the darkness and hope to myself, “Action movie? Action movie. Action movie!” I was usually right and that made me happy.
    So…I guess that’s kindof a win?

  46. 46.

    Hal

    So is Bevin doing away with kynect for reasons other than not wanting to be a teahadist in a state with its own exchange? This is like all those repeal and replace republicans who want to get rid of the aca and replace with who knows what just to screw Obama’s legacy.

  47. 47.

    jl

    A little off topic, but related in the sense that it shows the rank immorality of what these red state are doing to their populations.
    US non-Hispanic white mortality rates are rising at an alarming rate, mostly due to suicide, drug addictions of various kinds, alcoholism and chronic disease.
    There have long been statistical hints that living standards of lower income people in the US have been declining at such a rate that their life-expectancy is falling, across many racial and ethnic groups. Now the evidence is becoming very clear. Not sure whether the link to the Deaton paper is free to public or not.

    I’ve heard a couple of news reports about it, and today there is a link at LGM blog. It is authored by Campos, who does things with numbers and statistics that I do not like in general, but in this post, he is mainly quoting recent work by new Nobel (Memorial) prize winner economists Angus Deaton.

    An invisible catastrophe
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/11/an-invisible-catastrophe

    Edit: and will add that I am disappointed by the scant attention given to this year’s Nobel (Memorial) prize to Deaton, who has a long history of outstanding empirical and theoretical work on the economics of household consumption, and also very high quality and innovative statistical techniques. If there is any solid core to microeconomics as a true empirical science, people like Deaton are doing it.

    Maybe his results fit too neatly into HRC and Sander’s campaigns for comfort (and while he doesn’t name name’s he makes the policy implications of his work a little too clear? I dunno, Seems like his prize went almost unnoticed.

  48. 48.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Hal: If they repealed it and replaced it with something exactly the same but called Shmobamacare, it’d be fine with me.

  49. 49.

    Steeplejack

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    FWIW, I very rarely use the front page. I “open in new tab” each new post from whatever current post I’m reading. The little pop-out “wings” on the new site are a nice way to do that. (On the mobile version, you have to go to the top of the post to see the icon indicating a new post is up, of course.)

    The other thing I was going to suggest was that going to www.balloon-juice.com/blog would get you to a cleaner page of the most recent posts, but that seems to have gone away. I can’t find a link for it on the current front page now. Oh, well. Work in progress.

  50. 50.

    Gin & Tonic

    @jl: I don’t know, didn’t seem to me like the attention to his award was disproportionate to prior recipients. I certainly saw coverage of it, and what his work was about, and this latest paper is getting a lot of press, too.

  52. 52.

    Steeplejack

    @Geeno:

    That is one of the priority hot-button issues being dealt with, we’ve been told.

    @Felonius Monk:

    Use the Tab key.

    This doesn’t work very well, at least for me. It either takes me back a little above my last position or a screen or two below.

    What I have been doing is to make a mental note of some (hopefully unique) text snippet in the comment that I want to come back to and then, after I have gone up and read the stuff above, open a search field, put in the snippet and let it “find” my place again down below. It’s a bit of work—and stupid as all get-out—but it helps for going up and down in long threads. Hopefully it is only a short-term solution.

  55. 55.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Felonius Monk: I’m currently getting a little more than 3.5s load time on the front page with ad blocker active.

    Most of which appears to be waiting for a server response.

    In the meantime, I have solved the redirect warning I have been getting since the new design went live by blocking the likebox.

  56. 56.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Steeplejack: This blog redesign is going the ICHC (I Can Has a Cheezburger) way.
    The goal of the redesign seems to be making sharing the blog content on social networks, easier. If that displeases or even gets rid of the long time commenters, its deemed OK. Since the people who just read the posts without ever reading or leaving a comment >> than the people who bother to do either or both.

    I think Balloon Juice has been Faceborged. (I am using Faceborg as a stand in for all the social media services). I hope I am wrong, but we will see.

  57. 57.

    Steeplejack

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Well, we’ll see. I’m not that pessimistic right now. As I said, I don’t go through the front page much, so I can probably avoid a lot of the Faceborg stuff.

  58. 58.

    Duane

    Missouri hasn’t expanded Medicaid. We were never part of the Confederacy.
    Although we may be now.

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