There's one, slight benefit to all those Republican lawmakers in red states refusing to expand Medicaid. They've provided a baseline for comparison to see how successful it is in the expansion states. Here's another measure, from a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis:
States that opted not to expand Medicaid under the health law will experience more spending growth this year than states that are growing the program, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. […]
[T]he report shows that states that chose not to expand are projected to see a 6.8 percent increase in the amount of state taxpayer dollars that support Medicaid in fiscal 2015. States expanding the program will only see a 4.4 percent rise in state spending. So far, 27 states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid.
The spending growth in non-expansion states will come even though enrollment is expected to grow at much lower rates than in expansion states. The number of people enrolled in non-expansion states is likely to go up by 5.2 percent, compared to 18 percent in expansion states in fiscal 2015.
So there's one more fiscal benefit to states that accept the expansion money—they're covering more people, and seeing costs rise more slowly. The fact that the federal government is paying 100 percent of the costs through 2016 accounts for a good part of the spending slowdown for state. Beyond that, the expansion states are saving money by not having to help pick up the costs of treating the uninsured. We already know that
hospitals will save $5.7 billion this year, thanks largely to Medicaid expansion. It's a policy that makes good fiscal sense, as well as being the moral thing to do.
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This is darned good news for the states, and for the people in them, who took Medicaid expansion. It's one more really good argument to turn around the states that didn't, where Republican lawmakers have cruelly turned their low-income citizens into guinea pigs to show just how backwards they are.