Yesterday, as the House first put off their vote on the AHCA, Kansas voted to finally accept Medicaid expansion offered under the ACA (“Obamacare”).
This massive shift came as Kansas voters finally rejected hardliner conservatives for moderate conservatives in the state legislature. Kansas has suffered massive budget shortfalls and healthcare failures with a extreme conservative administration, but the ability of these new moderates to work with Democrats will bring substantial relief to the people of Kansas.
At the same time, it seems to be a tacit admission that embracing Obamacare is the best possible solution Republicans can come up with at this time. As I said earlier, Republican cuts to risk sharing and reinsurance programs originally provided for by the ACA have made it so that Obamacare individual market collapse is almost exclusively a red district problem.
It’s time for Republicans in Washington to recognize what their own party members in statehouses have come to accept, now that they’ve failed miserably to come up with an alternative of their own they need to let Obamacare work.