VoxCare Newsletter
By: Sarah Kliff
VoxCare Guest of the Week: Joan Alker, one of Vox’s favorite area Medicaid experts, is the executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. She, like the rest of us, is thinking about the PA-18 special election this week and the political resilience of Medicaid in rural America, the subject of a great piece this week in Kaiser Health News. This week’s election results in Pennsylvania and the current impasse in the Virginia Legislature on Medicaid expansion underscore that elections matter to the future of Medicaid and Medicaid matters to the future of those seeking election. Polling in both Pennsylvania and Virginia found that health care was a key issue on the minds of voters, and, increasingly, that includes Medicaid. A recent Kaiser Health News tracking poll found that 70 percent of Americans have a personal connection to someone covered by Medicaid–up considerably from 50 percent in 2011. Medicaid’s role as a critical leg of the stool in the health coverage system is increasingly apparent to the voting public. Both President Trump and Speaker Ryan are on record supporting more than a trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts. With conservative Democrats like Conor Lamb on record opposing these cuts, Medicaid may become one of the most consequential policy issues debated in the midterm election cycle. The Virginia House of Delegates, where Republicans came within a coin toss of losing control, has gotten the voters’ message on Medicaid. However, Virginia Senate Republicans are not quite there yet. If they do agree to get on board wit h Medicaid expansion, it will likely be Republican senators representing rural areas who move to support expansion because they realize how important Medicaid is to their districts. As Kaiser Health News pointed out this week, Medicaid is “rural America’s financial midwife.”