Balky states likely to join Medicaid expansion
If you pay for it, they will come. That was the opinion of experts gathered at the Harvard School of Public Health Friday, as they discussed the national health care reform law’s dramatic expansion of Medicaid, a key provision of which the Supreme Court struck down in its landmark decision approving most of the program Thursday. While much initial attention focused on the justices’ 5-4 decision supporting the constitutionality of the “individual mandate,” which requires the uncovered to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, the major change forced by the court is in the law’s Medicaid provisions. The original legislation, officially called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, required states to expand Medicaid to cover people whose incomes are at up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. States that refused would not only have forgone additional federal funds, they would have lost all of their other Medicaid dollars as...