Trapped Between Earning Too Much For Health-Law Subsidies, Too Little for Existing Medicaid

Millions of Americans are stuck in a health coverage gap created by the Supreme Court strucking down the Obamacare mandate that states expand Medicaid and the refusal of many states to voluntarily expand their existing Medicaid programs, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. The WSJ reports on one woman who earns $7,000 as a cleaner, which is too little to get help buying coverage on the healthcare insurance exchanges and too much to get coverage in Alabama's Medicaid program.

Twenty-four Republican-led states have declined the expansion, WSJ also reports. That might be changing in some states: "Some GOP-led states are revisiting their decision as complaints pile up over the coverage gap—and its consequences for businesses—in such states as Utah and Florida. The state senate in New Hampshire last week reached a tentative deal to expand Medicaid. In Virginia, newly elected Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe hopes to get legislators to reverse his Republican predecessor's stance against expansion," according to WSJ.

The Washington Post editorialized this week that Virginia should expand Medicaid because "people above and below them get help from other federal health-care provisions — and while Virginia’s citizens pay federal taxes to fund the coverage expansion but get none of those dollars back."