Fun Way to Kill Some Time

A cool way to spend an hour or so on a day when not much is happening is to see if you can find the stupidest thing anyone’s done recently. The easiest way to collect the necessary data is wander the Internet looking for positions taken by Republicans. And I found it. It’s a stunner. In fact, many readers may already know it. I sorta did but wasn’t aware of the magnitude till I saw the data in a recent report from the Urban Institute.

So here it is: the twenty-four states (all “red” as if you needed to be told) who have declined to participate in the Medicaid programs that are part of the Affordable Care Act will be, between now and 2022, sacrificing a total of $424 billion in Federal funds for health care for their residents. Analyses of the cascading impact of this shortfall predict an additional loss of $168 billion in direct Federal support to hospitals and all of this is projected to cost these states literally hundreds of thousands of jobs and the associated growth in their economy that would accompany this increase in employment (the Urban Institute’s estimate for 2015 alone is 170,000 lost jobs). If this isn’t bad enough, we still haven’t factored in the added cost to these states when those without insurance and who won’t be covered under Medicaid show up in the ER in public hospitals and will have to be cared for.

You might ask, “Why?” You might — and you’d get a peculiar answer: “Because the states can’t afford the costs of cooperating in Obamacare.”

And, it is true, there is an added expense that states must pick up in order to be part of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. Want to know what it comes to? A grand total of $31 billion. Yes, that’s correct. These Republican controlled states are willing to give up nearly a half-trillion in direct Federal support and many additional long-term economic gains in order to save themselves from having to shell out a pittance. That’s like my telling you that I’m prepared to hand over $100 provided you find a way to contribute $4 to smooth the process and you saying, “Nope, I can’t afford the four bucks.”

You might ask, “Why? Really, why?” You might — and you’ll not get an answer from the politicians in those states so I’ll have to tell you:

It is because they’d rather go to hell in a hand-basket than do anything that makes Obama look good.