Three Southern state legislative leaders appear open to expanding health coverage to low-income residents in changes from previous rhetoric.
House speakers from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama said Republican lawmakers are looking into the expansion concept, which could result in nearly 500,000 people getting insurance in all three states combined, according to the think tank KFF.
“Eight years ago you would have had to dance around the jargon you used because Obamacare still had this bad branding with Republicans, but these days I don’t even think you have to do that,” Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist in Georgia, told Politico. “The politics have changed because the facts have changed.”
Alabama House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said lawmakers need to have more conversations about expanding coverage in the state and that a “private-public partnership” to do so “makes a lot of sense.”
A spokesman for Ledbetter said the top lawmaker is not advocating an expansion but that lawmakers need to explore all options.
Leaders of both chambers in Alabama are also meeting with Gov. Kay Ivey (R-AL) to discuss a proposal for the possible expansion. Ivey has not outwardly supported an expansion but said, “Medicaid expansion in Alabama will continue to be a serious consideration.”
In Georgia, Speaker Jon Burns said he was happy that more Republicans are looking at the facts around expanding the program, but in Mississippi, the state speaker said lawmakers have not “fully vetted” nor “looked at” the people who would be covered under the expansion.
Georgia already has a smaller medicare expansion program titled “Georgia Pathways to Coverage,” but it has only enrolled 2,344 people in the first five months it’s been open.
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The prospect of expanding medical coverage to more working-class people has not seen as much support in other conservative states. Some lawmakers in Kansas, South Carolina, and Wyoming have shown support, but House leaders in the three states remain against it.
“Medicaid should be reserved for only those truly that need it, the children, the elderly, the disabled,” Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins said. “It should be called government expansion or something else because Medicaid was meant for a specific purpose.”
