Despite Obama re-election, many states will still opt out of ObamaCare

With a second term now secure for President Barack Obama, states will need to decide whether they should opt-in to ObamaCare’s massive expansion of Medicaid. A Supreme Court decision earlier this year gave states the choice of whether to opt-in or not. So far, just nine states have committed to implementing the expansion. Leaders from most states,...

With a second term now secure for President Barack Obama, states will need to decide whether they should opt-in to ObamaCare’s massive expansion of Medicaid. A Supreme Court decision earlier this year gave states the choice of whether to opt-in or not.

So far, just nine states have committed to implementing the expansion. Leaders from most states, including both Republicans and Democrats, have either said no to the expansion or are leaning that way. Illinois lawmakers have yet to make a final decision, but current state law prohibits the expansion until at least 2015.

Lawmakers in Illinois should join the growing chorus of lawmakers across the country refusing to opt-in to ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid. The Medicaid expansion is simply unaffordable and is harmful to the very people Medicaid was meant to protect: the most vulnerable.

Medicaid is already on the verge of collapse. Ballooning enrollment has forced the state to turn to low reimbursement rates and long payment delays to make ends meet. This has pushed more and more doctors to turn away Medicaid patients. More than one-third of doctors in Illinois have stopped taking new Medicaid patients altogether.

Illinois’ problems are so bad that a federal judge ordered the state to study the program’s poor quality. The results of that study, recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that children with throat cancer were denied appointments with specialists nearly two-thirds of the time if they were enrolled in Medicaid. For those with juvenile diabetes or epilepsy, the odds of seeing a specialist were one-in-two.

ObamaCare’s massive expansion of Medicaid will only make these problems worse. The expansion would dump millions of new people into a broken system, forcing the most vulnerable to compete with millions of new people for appointments with fewer and fewer doctors willing to see them. The program is already failing to provide access to quality care for our neediest citizens. Adding millions of people to that failing program will only make things worse. The poorest, who have nowhere else to turn, will suffer most.

Obama may have won the election, but states still have no reason to voluntarily implement a law that remains widely unpopular.