GOP Prefers Socialism: Why GOP governors are saying yes to Medicaid, no to Obamacare’s exchanges
Single payer Medicaid = single payer aka Govt Socialism So in short, Republicans who have spent the better part of the last few years yelling about how bad a federal take over of health care would be… will just let that happen.
Obamacare health exchanges = market-oriented; and the same guys who claimed that exchanges and markets are the solution to all our woes, claim they are too hard to manage.
Posted by Sarah Kliff on February 21, 2013 at 8:58 am
In the span of a month, some of Obamacare’s most ardent opponents have come to embrace one of the law’s most crucial programs: The Medicaid expansion.
With seven Republican governors now signed up, most recently Florida’s Rick Scott on Wednesday, Republican-led states now account for nearly one-third of those expected to take the federal government’s money to expand Medicaid up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line.
These same governors have, however, also eschewed another big Obamacare component: The exchanges. The three most recent Medicaid expansion converts—Florida’s Rick Scott, Michigan’s Rick Snyder and Ohio’s John Kasich—have all rejected the idea of setting up the marketplace, leaving it to the feds to do the work, instead (Michigan is splitting the difference and will run its market in partnership with the feds).
Why embrace one part of the health care law — a single-payer system that will stretch President Obama’s law to cover millions more Americans — while ditching the other more market-oriented aspect? It likely has to do with the big consequences for a governor who chooses not to expand Medicaid—versus the tiny reward with setting up a very complex insurance marketplace. —->Continued