President Barack Obama’s health law [is] designed to expand coverage
for 30 million Americans, in part by adding 17 million people to
Medicaid.
But the impact of the high court’s ruling making the expansion
voluntary is likely to be compounded by another provision in the law
that the justices left intact: In 2014, states are no longer barred from
making it harder for adults to qualify for Medicaid.
Experts worry those two developments taken together could spur some states to reduce the number of people covered.
States could throw some low-income adults “into a black hole with
nowhere to turn for coverage," said Deborah Bachrach, who was New York’s
Medicaid director until 2010 and now is special counsel at Manatt,
Phelps & Phillips, a New York law firm.
-from "States Could Cut Medicaid Rolls In 2014 As A Result Of Court Ruling" by Phil Galewitz, staff writer for Kaiser Health News.
This article needs to read in its entirety. (Remember, in this case we are talking about Medicaid, not Medicare, which has its own monstrous problems.)
It is not so much ideology that produced this mess, it is the product of an incompetent process, largely political, exercised in a culture that promotes a sense of entitlement in its citizens (and non-citizens) and is without any effective checks against abuse (stealing, for example) that a market-place would generate. (But maybe that is the ideology.)
Florida's Governor Scott announced last Friday that Florida would opt-out of the Medicaid provisions of ObamaCare, just as described in the article. Texas is thinking about it, too.
Update:
The Republican governors of four states — Florida, Iowa, Louisiana and South Carolina — have declared
that they want to opt out of the expansion. Leaders of half a dozen
other states — including Texas, home to one of the largest
concentrations of uninsured people — are considering following suit.
-from The Washington Post, July 3, 2012
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