The “wingnut hole” measured: 5 million people without insurance thanks to Republicans refusal

• BY RYAN COOPER

Fliers promoting the Get Covered Illinois health insurance marketplace. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

Because of the decision on Obamacare by the Supreme Court, which left the decision to expand Medicaid (a key part of Obamacare) up to the individual states, most Republican-controlled states refused said expansion, leaving substantial portions of the citizenry in the lurch.

Ed Kilgore has been calling this the “wingnut hole,” and many have been speculating about its size. How many Americans will go without health insurance simply because the GOP dislikes the president? Well, happy 2014, dear readers: initial estimates are in, and we have 5 million lucky winners!

About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America. . . . The court effectively left it up to states to decide whether to open Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled, to more people, primarily poor working adults without children. . . .

Twenty-five states declined. That leaves 4.8 million people in those states without the health care coverage that their peers elsewhere are getting through the expansion of Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. More than one-fifth of them live in Texas alone, Kaiser’s analysis found.

That’s approximately the combined population of Delaware, Vermont, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska. Or alternatively, either Alabama, South Carolina, Colorado or the whole of Norway alone.

The Supreme Court decision was doubly unfortunate, because Republican states tend to be poorer than average and contain a disproportionate number of potential beneficiaries who are losing out. Obamacare, by virtue of distributing benefits downward, was aimed at those very people; it never occurred to the law’s architects that the vagaries of politics and law might give states a way out, and so they didn’t design a backup coverage mechanism.

Some refusenik states, like Iowa, might go forward with an Obamacare-instead-of-Medicaid expansion, but most probably will do nothing. Prospects are bad enough that health-care industry groups have basically given up trying to push through the expansion by lobbying and are just biding their time until conditions are more favorable.

It’s worth remembering that the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016 and 90 percent of the cost afterward. It could very well work out that refusenik states will not even save money because of additional spending on the uninsured in emergency rooms and elsewhere.

But regardless of the pitiful sums involved, make no mistake: This action is utterly gratuitous. Combined with the probable coming Republican refusal to extend unemployment benefits that George wrote about this morning, this is a particularly stiff kick in the teeth to the United States’ most vulnerable citizens to usher in the new year.

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