Republican Governors Are Hurting More People Than the ACA Website:
Let us stop talking about the goddamned healthcare.gov website for two seconds here. Yeah, yeah, it's a programming clusterfuck of Windows Vista proportions, although Republicans bear a great deal of blame here for trying to undermine it every step of the way because they're sore loser motherfuckers whose ideological narcissism would make them suck their own dicks if they could contort themselves enough. But, no, no, let's not talk about the website for a moment. That's easy to grapple with. It's a big problem with a small cause.
Instead, let's turn to the real Obamacare crisis caused by Republican governors around the nation. See, one of the underreported stories is that the main reason the Affordable Care Act will fail to cover millions of Americans is because states run by the aforementioned cocksuckers refuse to accept the 3 years of 100% funding for expanded Medicaid for people who are dirt poor, but not dirt poor enough for Medicaid in its current form and who can't afford insurance because they don't qualify for the tax credits that offset the price. For 25 states (it used to be 26, but Ohio got infected by sanity recently), this action alone will ensure that a large number of their uninsured citizens remain uninsured, thus potentially costing the states far, far more than accepting the funding, even in the long term, would have.
For instance, in the Rude Pundit's home state of Louisiana, 34% of the non-elderly uninsured adults in the state fall into the income crack the Medicaid expansion was supposed to spackle. That was until the Supreme Court said the mothefuckers could go ahead and fuck their mothers, and Bobby Jindal told his mom to lube up. That's 242,150 adults without health insurance in his state. By the way, since Louisiana funds Medicaid only for people making 24% or less of the poverty line annually (only Alabama is crueler at 16%), that leaves about 87% of non-elderly adults who live below the poverty line without health insurance. In the entire nation, and all of these figures are from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the coverage gap in these states is over 4.8 million people (subtracting Ohio from Kaiser's numbers), 27% of all non-elderly adults without insurance in the nation.
Or, to put it simply, Republican governors and legislators have decided that they would rather have sick poor people in their states than free money to give them health insurance because the money comes from the black man who's president. Once again, the GOP is doing real and actual harm to Americans.
Defending his decision to tell President Obama to shove that socialist cash up his ass, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said that only 6% of Louisiana's adults would remain uninsured after some magic hoodoo he wants to try. Oh, and, hey, he tells us that there's lots of charity hospitals in the state.
But, oh, and, hey, look, Louisiana's own Health and Human Services Department estimates that the state will probably save over $350 million over ten years if it accepted the funds. In a worst-case scenario where doctors and hospitals get their rates jacked up sky high, it could cost $1.7 billion over ten years. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune editorialized, "But even $1.71 billion, if that amount proves true, is precious little compared with the benefits of providing almost a quarter of a million Louisianians health coverage." It's moral, the newspaper says. Jindal and the GOP believe it is more moral to not have government programs for the poor.
Jindal clings to a good lie, like a recent ad where he said that with the Affordable Care Act, the federal government "tried to put the IRS in charge of our health care," something that is blatantly, demonstrably false. But, hey, why bother telling the truth when bullshit is so much easier to shovel?
You know the saddest part here? Probably a good number of those quarter million people who are in the coverage gap in Louisiana, if not in all 25 states where the bastards in charge don't think you deserve to go to a doctor when you're sick unless you pay full cost, are proud that they don't have to let the evil Barack Obama give them free insurance.
