And the GOP plan is still repeal

After a three month delay that cost Michigan’s taxpayers $630 million, Healthy Michigan has enrolled 85,761 people since April 1, according to Charles Gaba’s ACASignups.net.

The program is expected to cover about 500,000 Michiganders.

Governor Rick Snyder recognized that turning down health insurance for a half million people that the state would pay for anyway was a bad a idea — especially after President Obama carried the state by 9.5% in 2012 — and accepted expansion.

The likely Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate Terri Lynn Land says she supports expansion, but she has repeatedly supported the Ryan budgets, which would repeal Obamacare with no replacement for Medicaid expansion. She would also help hand the Senate leadership over to Mitch McConnell who says his goal is to repeal the law “root and branch,” which, of course, means the end of Medicaid expansion.

What happens to those 500,000 people then?

Land has offered no substantive plan to replace Medicaid expansion herself, and certainly no plan that retains expansion would garner the support of a majority in her party.

Thanks in large part to the Senate Majority PAC, voters are recognizing that her campaign is a proxy for the GOP’s most powerful interests including the Koch brothers. She will say anything to appear rational but the people spending millions to elect her aren’t expecting her to do anything to help the uninsured if she’s elected. You shouldn’t either.

The marked cruelty of refusing to expand Medicaid in 24 Republican states is beginning to gain a face with the death of Charlene Dill in Florida. The American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA) estimates that “3.7 million Americans with serious mental illness, psychological distress or a substance abuse disorder” are without insurance because of the GOP’s refusal to expand Medicaid.

Electing a Republican senator from Michigan would almost guarantee that Republicans would take control of both houses of Congress. Then the party would do everything it could to try to reverse the remarkable reduction of America’s uninsured in the last six months.

We now have proof that there’s a tremendous demand for affordable insurance in Michigan. Going backwards and placing 500,000 of our fellow residents in the Medicaid gap again would be a tragic mistake we can’t afford.