Republicans have left Healthy Michigan in peril and only Gretchen Whitmer will save it — again When it comes to preserving health insurance for 680,000 Michiganders covered by the state’s Medicaid expansion program, the question is who do you trust — the woman who fought to expand it in the first place or the guy who joined “at least nine […]

Michigan Congressman Dan Kildee reminds Governor Rick Snyder and others that without the Affordable Care Act, there would be no Medicaid expansion. At the moment, the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, is anyone’s guess. Congressional Republicans and Donald Trump promised to repeal the law on the President’s first day in office … but that obviously didn’t […]

The history of Medicaid expansion in Michigan as part of the Affordable Care Act is a long and troubled one. The Republican-led legislature hemmed and hawed and finally passed it in a way that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars and unnecessarily delayed working poor Michiganders from obtaining coverage. When they finally got around to passing it, they did it […]

Fantastic news for the 600,000 low-income Michiganders who rely on the program for their health insurance. When the Michigan Legislature submitted their plans for a customized version of Medicaid expansion to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2013, there was no guarantee CMS would sign off on either of the waivers to require more “skin in the […]

Chris already did an excellent job highlighting the significant shortcomings of Sunday’s Detroit News editorial, which essentially asserts that the sky is falling and we’d all better run away from Michigan’s Medicaid expansion program, the Healthy Michigan Plan. If you haven’t read Chris’ piece, you should. But there’s a sobering omission I had to weigh in on, something that’s left […]

“Obamacare savings may be short-lived”! shouts the headline of an editorial in today’s edition of The Detroit News. They are referring to Medicaid expansion in our state, a program that is fully funded by the federal government until 2017 and funded at a level of 90% after that, all while giving an additional 600,000 working poor Michiganders health care coverage […]

Study shows that access to physicians went up, not down — exactly the opposite of what ACA opponents predicted. Once again, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is proving its critics wrong. Opponents of the ACA, or Obamacare, have been falling all over themselves proclaiming that an influx of new patients will overburden the healthcare system, creating a dire doctor shortage. […]

Montanans are a special breed of Americans. They are fiercely independent and, in general, quite conservative. However, one thing that most folks from Montana have no patience for is when outsiders come into their state, run down their elected officials, and try to tell them how to vote. That’s exactly what the Koch brothers corporatist front group Americans for Prosperity […]

Study released by the University of Michigan shows how Michigan may set an example for other states.

Republicans like Paul Ryan and Terri Lynn Land are still running on the promise of taking away health insurance from more than 24 million Americans who have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, at least 10 million of whom did not have coverage before the law went into effect. They’re sticking with this message, even though repeal is less […]

Back when Michigan legislators were debating whether to expand Medicaid in our state through the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), Rick Snyder expressed his concern that our state didn’t “have enough capacity to put essentially 400,000 more people into a medical home model with a primary care environment, as opposed to having them simply go to an ER”. That’s the sort […]