Walker rejection of Medicaid Expansion adds burden of uninsured sick to reform, fueling rise in health care costs.

Those who have been the highest burden on our private national health care model remain a burden, thanks to Republican governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid.

That burden will continue to raise costs on the reformed system, ObamaCare. Just an accident? 

As simple as this concept is, Republicans like Walker refuse to save money if they have to use "government" wisely.   

NY Times: A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance … they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid. 

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”

And odd note: Check out the extremely low level of income used to qualify for Medicaid in other states, and the fact that ObamaCare will not subsidize the poor if they earn under a certain income level. What the heck?

Willie Charles Carter, an unemployed 53-year-old income is below Mississippi’s ceiling for Medicaid — which is about $3,000 a year — but he has no dependent children, so he does not qualify. And his income is too low to make him eligible for subsidies on the federal health exchange.

“You got to be almost dead before you can get Medicaid in Mississippi,” he said.

Dr. Aaron Shirley, a physician who has worked for better health care for blacks in Mississippi, said  “If you look at the history of Mississippi, politicians have used race to oppose minimum wage, Head Start, all these social programs. It’s a tactic that appeals to people who would rather suffer themselves than see a black person benefit.”

One more thing: The states that created their own exchanges had no problem signing people up for coverage on Jan. 1, 2014. But the states that refused and made the federal government set up the exchanges made the system crash, jamming up the series of internet tubes. That's how the GOP makes government look bad.