Think Progress’ Tara Culp-Ressler highlights the findings of the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative report, “Assessing the Potential Impact of the Affordable Care Act on Uninsured Community Health Center Patients: An Update.” The findings show that despite the fact that Affordable Care Act has been in place for four years by now, more than one million low-income Americans who are dependent on community health centers are still going uninsured.
Stated in the article, more than 70 percent of those people live in just 11 southern states, and 35 percent of them live within the borders of five states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. In addition to the human cost, there are also serious financial consequences to resisting Medicaid expansion. Community health centers earn more from Medicaid reimbursements than they do from the sliding scale of payments they receive from the uninsured. The new report estimates that community health centers in anti-expansion states will forgo $569 million in the revenues they would have collected from new Medicaid patients.
