Prospects for health finance reform ("Obamacare")

With the election decided, it’s clear that health reform — the Affordable Care Act — is here to stay. One of its key provisions enables states to expand Medicaid to cover low-income adults with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line, with the federal government paying nearly all of the cost...

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if all states adopt the expansion, they will spend only 2.8 percent more on Medicaid from 2014 to 2022 than they would have spent without health reform. And that estimate doesn’t account for the ways in which expanding Medicaid will save states money, such as by cutting the cost of treating uninsured residents in emergency rooms and health clinics.

While governors in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and several other states have said they’ll reject the Medicaid expansion, most states are either moving forward or their governors remain undecided, as this map shows. In many of the latter states, governors had said that they wanted to wait until after the election to decide. 

Image and text from Off the Charts Blog, via The Dish.