Evening Must-Read: Over at HealthInsurance.Org: Harold Pollack and Jon Gruber

Jon Gruber and Harold Pollack: Reports of ACA demise: greatly exaggerated: “For this edition, I Skyped with Dr. Jonathan Gruber…

…who is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the health care program at the National Bureau of Economic Research….

One tragedy deserves attention:

Jon: I think, Harold, the single thing we probably need to keep the most focus on is the tragedy of the lack of Medicaid expansions…. A life-costing tragedy has taken place in America as a result of that Supreme Court decision… half the states in America are denying their poorest citizens health insurance paid for by the federal government…. I’m offended because I believe we can help poor people get health insurance, but I’m almost more offended…. When the Supreme Court decision came down, I said, “It’s not a big deal. What state would turn down free money from the federal government to cover their poorest citizens?”

The fact that half the states are… is nothing short of political malpractice….

Harold: One of the things that’s really striking to me is there’s a politics of impunity towards poor people, particularly non-white poor people… a feature rather than a bug in the internal politics in some of these states…. It’s such a toxic political perspective…. It has to be shown that that approach to politics doesn’t work….

Jon: That’s a great way to put it. There’s larger principles…. These states are… not just turning down covering the poor people but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that…. They are not just not interested in covering poor people, they are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness….

Harold: By the way, one of the real ironies is… every city and county and correctional system and public hospital desperately wants this…. From Texas, Harris County and the City of Houston… desperately need that money…. Maybe that just we have to wait until President Obama leaves office because it’s the centerpiece of his presidency and it’s just too hard to do while he’s sitting in that chair.

Jon: Harold, if we look at the original expansion of Medicaid, it took about five years to get all the states in…. We don’t have to panic at this point… we can overcome this, but it’s just very sad along the way…