Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is the latest Republican state chief executive pushing for Medicaid’s expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act. Almost 2 million people currently receive Medicaid benefits; an expansion is expected to allow an additional 470,000 more uninsured, low-income Michigan residents to be covered.
Snyder stated that with the extension, routine and preventative health care would be available to approximately 320,000 Michigan residents within the first year, and more than 470,000 people would be covered by 2021. That coverage would reduce the number of uninsured residents by a 46 percent, which would save an estimated $351 million by 2022.
Snyder is the sixth prominent republican to support the extension. The health care reform law will extend Medicaid to anyone earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, $15,282 for a single individual. Under the law, the government would pay to cover newly eligible individuals on Medicaid from 2014 to 2016, and then would begin scaling back the support over a number of years.
The Supreme Court ruled that individual states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion to lower income individuals; if all fifty states participated in the expansion, an additional 17 million people would be covered.
