Medicaid expansion becomes key issue in red states
LINCOLN, Neb. — For nearly a decade, opposition to former President Barack Obama’s health care law has been a winning message for Nebraska Republicans.
It’s helped them win every statewide office, control the Legislature and hold all the state’s congressional seats. So it was something of a surprise for Bob Tatum when he set out to ask his fellow Nebraskans if they would back a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid, one of the pillars of Obama’s health overhaul.
“There seems to be a lot more support than I anticipated,” said Tatum, who lives in a remote town near the Colorado border.
It took him little more than a week to gather over 100 petition signatures in Perkins County, where roughly 70 percent of the 1,963 registered voters are Republicans. Tatum, 66, also is a Republican but differs from most of his party’s elected officials. He supports the Medicaid expansion because his job as an ambulance driver brings him into frequent contact with working people who can’t afford insurance but earn too much to qualify for regular Medicaid.
“When I was circulating petitions, pretty much everyone signed it without objection,” Tatum said. “I didn’t expect that to be the case in rural Nebraska.”
Nebraska isn’t the only conservative state where residents are bypassing a legislature that has refused to expand Medicaid.
Voters in two other Republican-dominated states, Idaho and Utah, also will decide in November whether to expand the health insurance program to more lower-income Americans. Another ballot initiative, in Montana, seeks to raise a tobacco tax to keep funding a Medicaid expansion that is set to expire.
It also has become a focal point in numerous governor’s races.
The election-year push in conservative-leaning states for one of the main aspects of Obama’s health care law has surprised many Republican lawmakers after they spent years attacking it.
Most GOP lawmakers in Idaho staunchly opposed expansion efforts there and cast it as a welfare program that would deepen the state’s reliance on the federal government. Supporters responded by gathering more than 75,000 petition signatures, far exceeding the minimum threshold to qualify for the ballot.
Expansion advocates launched a petition drive in Utah after continued resistance from the Republican-dominated Legislature. Utah lawmakers did expand coverage to about 6,000 of the state’s neediest residents last year and approved another expansion measure with work requirements, but the federal government hasn’t yet accepted that plan. Expansion advocates say it still leaves tens of thousands of people without insurance.