In 2014, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. It was an expansion of Medicaid that North Carolina and 9 other states refused to join.
As a result of the Affordable Care Act, North Carolina just recently expanded Medicaid. This will help 600,000 adults in North Carolina get medical care. They were the last state to accept the Medicaid expansion. Other states, like Alabama and South Carolina, have shown interest in doing the same.
The Medicaid expansion was first suggested in March 2023, and many officials backed it. North Carolina is the 40th state to adopt it.
“The growth of Medicaid is not going away. Why then should we refuse the tax money we’ve already given to Washington? “Why should we stop people in North Carolina from getting that?” asked the state’s leader, Roy Cooper.
People between the ages of 19 and 64 who make up to 138% of the government poverty line can follow the rules. People who are single and make less than $20,000 a year or families of three who make less than $34,000 a year can get Medicaid and benefits for free.
In North Carolina, more than 10 million people do not have health insurance. This increase of Medicaid will cover about 5.6% of those people.
Roy Cooper has been pushing for Medicaid expansions since 2017. However, it took a while to reach a deal because North Carolina is a split state, with half of the leaders being Republicans and the other half being Democrats. Cooper is a Democrat.
The biggest problem with expanding Medicaid was that Conservatives were against it because they were afraid the government would cut its funding since most of it comes from the government. If any of the remaining states agreed to expand Medicaid by 2022, the government would give them an extra $1.8 billion over the next two years.
That being said, there is doubt about whether the rest of the states, which are mostly run by Republicans, will also agree to expand Medicaid.
