Texas Left Me Out

Dylan Scott reports on the organizing effort in red states to protest their refusing ACA Medicaid expansion in Talking Points Memo.

Obamacare advocates are actively recruiting those left out of the Medicaid expansion in Republican-controlled states to lobby state officials to change their minds and participate in that key provision of the health care reform law. So far, the effort is most organized in Texas, which is also the state with the most people in that Medicaid expansion gap: 1 million. But it's likely to pick up elsewhere as the Obama administration and outside advocates apply pressure to the 25 states that have resisted expansion for the first year. Texas Left Me Out, the combined effort of several community groups, is a website designed to collect those people's stories and organize them into a cohesive political action constituency. It asks those in the Medicaid gap to sign a petition to stay informed about advocacy events and share their story on the site. 

The strategy is simple: sheer political force. They'll ask people to turn up at legislative committee hearings and stage protests at the state capitol. Conference calls and press conferences will be the norm. They aren't waiting for 2015 either. A group is going to a state insurance department meeting Dec. 20 to rally for expansion. Those left out of the expansion are receptive to the effort.  

Irma Aguilar, a separated mother of four who lives in San Antonio and has been recruited by the Texas groups, said it was a "a real shocker" when an Obamacare canvasser came to her house to explain her options to her under the law, only to find out that her income as an assistant manager at Pizza Hut was too low to qualify for financial assistance to purchase private insurance and she couldn't sign up for Medicaid because Perry and the GOP-led legislature had rejected the expansion. "They didn't want to take that extra money to help us poor people back here," she told TPM. "What about us back here? It's really hard. I thought with this law, they would try to work to help everybody, but apparently not. They just think of themselves. They've just let us struggle."