Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe's efforts to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act was thwarted because former Senator Phillip P. Puckett quit the state Senate, The Washington Post's Laura Vozzella reports. McAuliffe had hoped to sneak budget language past the Republicans to expand Medicaid on his own: "Then McAuliffe’s camp found an obscure bit of language in the previous year’s budget that appropriated extra Medicaid funds if — and only if — a newly formed (and hopelessly deadlocked) state Medicaid commission agreed to expansion. If the language was ripped out of that context, the thinking went, McAuliffe could claim that it authorized him to spend an extra $2 billion a year in federal Medicaid funds."
Puckett was enticed to quit by Republicans who discussed jobs for himself and his daughter, Vozzella reports. The jobs nor the Medicaid expansion have come to fruition.
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