Will this report be enough to embarrass Gov. Greg Abbott into action?

Will this report be enough to embarrass Gov. Greg Abbott into action?

As the Kaiser foundation reports, 14 states currently set Medicaid eligibility for parents at below half of the federal poverty level. One of the most stringent requirements is found in Texas, the largest state sitting out the Medicaid expansion. Medicaid coverage in Texas is cut off for parents earning above 19 percent of the federal poverty level — or $3,760 for a family of three. The eligibility cutoff for parents of a dependent child, according to the Kaiser foundation report, is only lower in Alabama ($3,562), and it isn't much higher in Missouri ($4,551) or Louisiana ($4,479). The income thresholds do increase with more dependent children. With the exception of Wisconsin, none of the non-expansion states provide full Medicaid coverage for childless adults.

It's even worse than that headline would suggest, because the limit is actually just $3,760 and that's for a family of three with dependent children. If you're childless, you're completely out of luck. When we talk about the Medicaid gap created in the states that refused to take Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, the people who cannot qualify for traditional Medicaid and make too little to get federal subsidies to buy on the exchange, we're talking about some really, really poor people. A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation:There's about 4 million people represented in that graph, about 1 million of them in Texas alone. We're not talking about people who are scraping by mostly okay. We're talking about people who are deeply in poverty. Imagine what life is like for the roughly 5 million people the state of Texas deems poor enough to get some help.