Health Care Advocacy and the Medicaid Gap in Alabama

We're in the middle of our second day of facilitating an enrollment fair. The public library in Brewton, AL has been kind enough to let us use their space to help people through the Marketplace.gov website, and so far, several people have come in to get help with their application.

The experience of working with people has been eye opening, and it has been a tangible example of how profoundly broken our health care system is in Alabama, and throughout the United States. We've had to explain to several people in our time in Alabama that they fall into the "Medicaid Gap," that space where one makes almost no money but just enough to avoid qualifying for Medicaid services, and certainly not enough to realistically afford a plan from the health insurance marketplace.

. @GovernorBentley please decide to expand Medicaid and give Alabamians access to affordable health care. It's the right thing to do!
— Andrew Battista (@rawdeal85) March 26, 2014

Alabama is one of 24 states whose governor (Robert Bentley) chose not to expand our state's Medicaid program. Bentley has been defiant in his decision to turn down federal funding for health care. According to Bentley in his state of the state address, "Our great nation is 17.2 trillion dollars in debt and it increases by two billion dollars every single day. That is why I cannot expand Medicaid in Alabama." But this is faulty logic. Alabama is already one of the worst states in terms of exploiting its poor citizens. We are only one of six states that taxes groceries to the fullest extent, and we have some of the lowest property taxes in the United States. Our increasing national debt has every but as much to do with the 683 billion dollars we spend each year on direct military spending than it does with whatever money one of our states would accept for health care coverage. In the United States, we fund what we want to fund.

What does this mean for actual people? Many of us think that you have to work to deserve health care coverage, but what we are finding out is that many people do work minimum wage or near-minimum wage jobs in retail outlets, yet these people still cannot afford the plans that are being offered to them. There are so many individuals in Alabama who are frustrated by cycles of poverty. Even with the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, health care coverage will not realistically be in their grasp.

One of the things we've pledged to do on this trip is to demand change in Alabama. I encourage everyone to do what I did this morning: send a tweet or make a phone call to Gov. Bentley's office and demand that he vote to expand Medicaid in our state.