EDITORIAL: Medicaid’s not so bad

Oct. 10--Americans like Medicaid.

We know that because reputable polling groups and researchers, such as the Kaiser Family Foundation, have data that prove it.

Americans like Medicaid -- particularly those who use Medicaid for their health insurance.

Oh, but wait, says Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, our state's great defense against this "failed system," as he calls it. Whether caused by personal beliefs or political ideology, Alabama's elected leader does not like Medicaid and will not support expansion of the program under the guidelines of President Obama's Affordable Care Act. (We'll see if his stance changes after the November election, but that's another story for another day.)

It's funny how virtually every believable metric, poll or survey about Medicaid goes against the governor's anti-Medicaid expansion mantra. We wonder if the governor needs his glasses checked. Can't he see it?

No one claims Medicaid is perfect. No government program is. But Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income and disabled Americans, is nothing if not a government program whose merits far outweigh its faults. And those who benefit from it understand that truth.

In 2011, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 86 percent of the people on Medicaid said the program was "somewhat" or "very" positive. Surveys taken since then have produced lower results, though Medicaid still received a positive rating of nearly 70 percent.

"It's surprisingly popular," Mollyann Brodie, Kaiser's top pollster, told The New York Times this week. "Conventional wisdom is that it shouldn't be, but it actually is."

If Bentley isn't impressed by that research, there's this: A majority of people in three Southern states, Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas, told the journal Health Affairs that health-care coverage through Medicaid was superior to private insurance. Medicaid's restrictions on which doctors patients can see didn't sway respondents in those states to side with private insurers.

Alabama, under Bentley's leadership, remains an outsider looking in on progress, its nose pressed against the glass door.

Republicans and Democrats alike may consider this a political issue, and understandably so. But this isn't about politics. This is about expanding a federal program, at virtually no cost to the state, that will help hundreds of thousands of Alabamians. Bentley surely sees that, but won't do anything about it.

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