Comedian John Stewart takes on Texas, Mississippi, and Missouri for their failure to pass Medicaid expansion on “The Daily Show.”
Stewart says Missouri and 25 other states refused federal dollars to expand Medicaid — all of which have Republican governors or Republican-controlled legislatures — for “hating Obama more than poverty.”
The plan would pay for the expansion for the next three years, and then states would begin to pay for the expansion on a sliding scale after that. Nixon began the push to expand Medicaid to cover those just above the federal poverty line in 2012, but ultimately the legislature rejected the proposal.
Stewart blasts Sen. John Lamping, who says, “we can barely afford to be in the Medicaid program as it exists today.”
“Boy, that is a tough choice,” Stewart comments. “Should we, as a state, accept 100 percent this program’s expansion costs from the federal government for the first three years? Or, I don’t know, f*** it?”
Missouri’s medical industry, the state Chamber of Commerce and advocacy groups pushed the legislature to accept the expansion proposal, saying more than 300,000 would benefit from the coverage. Though it was voted down on a party-line vote, a special committee was formed to look at the state’s Medicaid system. That committee continues to meet through the interim. However, even if the legislature expands the program during the 2014 session, it will lose federal funding because the deadline to enroll is Jan. 1, 2014.
Here’s a clip of “The Daily Show” called “Medi-can’t.” The first clip sets up the segment, featuring Texas and Mississippi. The Missouri slam comes in after the commercial break, in the second video below.