Kay Hagan comes out swinging for Obamacare.
This Hagan moment was key. It came during a hearing today for Sylvia Matthews Burwell, Obama’s pick to head the HHS, and Dylan Scott has the details:
“Last year in North Carolina, our state legislature and governor decided against expanding the state’s Medicaid program,” Hagan said as she started her questioning, “and as a result, about 500,000 people who would have qualified for coverage through Medicaid are not now able to do so.”
“These are some of the most vulnerable in our society,” she said, “who will continue to seek care in emergency rooms and then will leave chronic conditions unmanaged, which we know is detrimental to their health and the economy.” [...]
Hagan then gave the example of a 35-year-old single woman whose income is below the federal poverty level — therefore falling in the Medicaid expansion gap, which in non-expanding states means that those Americans will not have access to health coverage under Obamacare.
“So if a state had expanded it, she would have had access,” Hagan said, “where in the 24 states that haven’t expanded it, there is this huge number of people, in my state, 500,000, that are still without coverage.”
The key context here: Hagan’s new opponent, state House speaker Thom Tillis, was a staunch opponent of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which would have expanded coverage to half a million North Carolinians. During the GOP primary he even ran an ad boasting that he was solely responsible for stopping that outcome “cold.”
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