This is an opinion column.

Now is not the time to expand Medicaid.

That’s the message from Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey.

That’s the message from Alabama Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh.

“I’m aware of the interest that’s there,” the governor said this week. “But there’s a lot of exploring that has to be done on how you pay for it.”

Marsh’s urgency was even more melancholy than the governor’s.

“I’ve not had a single colleague call and ask me about Medicaid expansion on the Republican side,” Marsh said. “I don’t think the mood has changed on that. If you ask me the opinion of the body, I don’t see anything happening in the session other than getting the budget passed.”

That’s right. To Marsh this is about a mood. And the company he keeps.

Not saving people’s lives.

Not the health of Alabamians.

Not sustaining rural hospitals and preserving the care they provide throughout Alabama.

It’s about a mood.

Let’s lay both of these responses on the operating table, take them apart and see what’s inside.

Ivey has answered the Medicaid question with a question long before she became governor. Expanding Medicaid would require a 10 percent match from state funds, and for some reason, Alabama has found this match too hard to come by, even before the pandemic, when this same governor was boasting of the best Alabama job market on record.

But look around the country. Louisiana has found the match. Arkansas has found the match. West Virginia has found the match.

Alabama draws down matching funds from the federal government all the time. And the same officials who will tell you it isn’t worth spending a dime to draw down a dollar, gladly and grossly hand out corporate welfare “incentives” to economic development projects that never show such returns for the state.

If we can’t find the money, then Alabama needs a governor with better eyesight.

Or better, yet, a governor who won’t lie. Because this isn’t about finding the money.

Marsh, at least, is somewhat more honest in his answer. His Republican colleagues are not in the mood. That partisan qualifier is important because his Democratic colleagues couldn’t be yelling louder. But Marsh only listens to one side of the aisle. Everybody else doesn’t matter.

But Medicaid expansion should be something conservatives love.

The health insurance gap is a ten-year-old concept that these folks should get by now. Expanding Medicaid gives working people healthcare coverage, not the welfare Cadillac freeloaders of Republican fever dreams.

As it is, if you’re in this gap, you have a choice: Continue working and go bankrupt when you have a medical emergency or give up working so you can qualify for regular old Medicaid.

Medicaid expansion rewards work. It doesn’t punish it.

Further, Republican governors all around the country have expanded Medicaid.

So if it’s not the money and it’s not ideology, what is it?

To see that answer, you have to look at a map. Only 14 states have refused to embrace the program. Lay it over a map of the Old Confederacy and you’ll see the same outlines. Of the 14 states linking arms in resistance, eight are from the old Confederacy and all but two of the others weren’t states in 1861.

14 states have refused to expand Medicaid, despite being besieged by a pandemic.

This is about the same old reactionary politics of spite and self-defeat. And under that, it’s about race. This has been a test of stubbornness: To what absurd condition must we sink to before our elected leaders would surrender to common sense. Never. The answer is never.

Alabama: We shall not be told. We shall not be helped. We shall not be saved.

We’re in the middle of a pandemic, but Alabama officials will leave as many as 300,000 people without healthcare and leave billions of dollars on the table just so they can prove they know better than Obama.

Ivey and Marsh are right about one thing. Now is not the time to expand Medicaid. The time to expand Medicaid was 10 years ago.

And to them, it doesn’t matter an itty-bitty damn how many will go bankrupt or how many families will be broken. They don’t care now — they never have and never will — how many will die.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.

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