How Red States Are Fucking Over the Poor on Obamacare, Or 320,000 Kentuckians Newly Eligible for Medicaid Are the Luckiest in the World

640,000 Kentuckians are uninsured.  Or were, before Tuesday. Of those, 320,000 are working poor people making too much money for regular Medicaid, but able to get Medicaid under the new Obamacare rules.

Because unlike almost every other red state in the nation, Kentucky's governor saw clearly through the repug bullshit just what Medicaid expansion would mean to Kentucky, and told his conservatard legislators, advisors and voters to fuck off and die because he was insuring every Kentuckian no matter whose idea it was.

Shame, shame, SHAME on the repug governors denying lifesaving and poverty-killing health insurance to their working poor.

Digby:

He may not have been able to completely block the plan but they made sure the people they like to call "welfare queens" (aka parasites) got theirs. And that's what's most important:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

People shopping for insurance on the health exchanges are already discovering this bitter twist.

“How can somebody in poverty not be eligible for subsidies?” an unemployed health care worker in Virginia asked through tears. The woman, who identified herself only as Robin L. because she does not want potential employers to know she is down on her luck, thought she had run into a computer problem when she went online Tuesday and learned she would not qualify.

Feature, not bug.

I'm going to guess that the Republicans may think this is a good way to drive a wedge between the Democrats and this loyal voting bloc of poor people. But I doubt it will work unless they literally die. Which may actually be the plan. They love human sacrifice.

Like cutting food stamps and eliminating Headstart and defunding Meals on Wheels, denying affordable health insurance to the working poor should be a crime. A felony with a mandatory minimum of life without parole in solitary confinement.

Motherfuckers.