obama care and expansion of medicare

The Affordable Care Act website is finally up and running, but hospitals are closing.  What is going on?  Republican leaders in 25 of the 50 states are refusing to expand Medicaid.  When what has come to be known as Obamacare was passed, along with it, subsidies for uninsured patients were cut, in anticipation that the states would expansion of Medicaid would take up the slack.  However, on the contrary, in states that have Republican leadership, there has been a resistance to expanding Medicaid.  Ironically, the same people who bellow about strengthening states’ rights and getting the federal government out of their business, have the power to alleviate the problems in their state by expanding Medicaid.  Though there is really no downside to not expanding Medicaid, the perception is that Republicans are refusing free federal money to spite the President. 

As time goes by, more and more hospitals will shut their doors and with them thousands of jobs will be lost to our economy.  Of course, the mortality rate is bound to increase among the uninsured citizens of Republican-controlled states such as Texas, Georgia and Florida.  The effect of this alone on the economy is obvious, because dead men (and women) tell no tales, buy no products, hold no jobs nor do anything else that increases the nation’s GDP. Also, as hospitals close, to the chagrin of ACA proponents, the supply of available healthcare service will diminish and the price of healthcare will most likely rise.  There will also be a reduction in productivity as people lose time from work to travel to where they can receive healthcare service.  In Sally Kohn’s article she mentions a story reported in Bloomberg News about Pam Renshaw.  Ms. Renshaw had an accident in her four-wheeler and sustained second and third degree burns on half her body.  Her local hospital has closed in Folkston, Georgia, so poor Ms. Renshaw, in pain from her injuries, had on travel two hours to a hospital in Florida for treatment.

Most of the “endangered” hospitals are in rural areas, the redder part of the red states where the hospital is not only the major source of healthcare but could possibly be one of the community’s largest employers.  As these hospitals close, the affect could be like a wrecking ball on commerce of the entire community.  It scares me to think of what would happen if the Terrell State Hospital closed.  Not only would thousands of patients be displaced, but the entire town would look like a ghost town of the Old West in a matter of weeks because the hospital employers such a large number of the town’s citizens.