The Atlantic
By: Alana Semuels
Indiana had not expanded Medicaid under Affordable Care Act, until Mike Pence developed Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) 2.0 on January 2015. However, his “Medicaid expansion” has many barriers, as Joan Alker, CCF’s executive director, mentioned. Now that Mike Pence is Vice-President of the United States, the vision of Medicaid nationwide could be based off of HIP 2.0.
…
“The good news is that Indiana is a state that bought into Obamacare,” Joan Alker, a Georgetown professor who is the executive director of the Center for Children and Families, told me. “The bad news is that Pence’s vision of coverage has a lot of barriers.”
With HIP 2.0, “there are more costs for low-income families and individuals,” Alker said. “That means they may miss the care that they need.”
“The lock-out issue is very important and problematic,” Alker said. “Forcing people to remain uncovered … seems a high price to pay.”
Even if the Trump administration somehow keeps the Medicaid expansion, experts say, the poor in states like Indiana could see access to health care diminished. That’s because the waiver granted to the state has provisions that the Obama administration insisted upon, provisions that a Trump administration may not care about. The state wanted the lowest monthly payment to be $3, the Obama administration insisted upon $1, according to the Indianapolis Star. The administration was also able to ensure that some “frail” or unhealthy people would not be locked out of health insurance if they failed to pay their premium. The Obama administration also insisted that people below the poverty level could not get kicked off of health care entirely, Alker said.
…
Read more here