At The American Prospect: Medicaid, the ACA's mainstay

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As in 2018, political warfare over healthcare -- now escalating in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death -- is focused on "protection for people with pre-existing conditions." While the war of words focuses on rules governing the individual market for health insurance, which insures about 3% of the population, the real fight is over the extent to which the federal government will subsidize health insurance for those who lack access to employer-sponsored insures. The pre-existing condition that matters most is low income.

The main engine by which the ACA has reduced the uninsured population is Medicaid. Obscuring this fact distorts our political debate as well as federal and state government response to the pandemic.  I made that case in 2018 in USA Today, and today I've made it again in The American Prospect:

Hire this woman

I'd have a lot more blog traffic If I could quote myself as enticingly on Twitter as The American Prospect's Jaime Fuller quotes everyone else. Based on my sampling of one, she has a click-through rate of over 50%. Her best tweets are all quote.  A sampling from the last few days (and last few minutes):

"'We’ve come for the poem about the duck,' the cop would say, as I pumped a shell into the chamber." oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/…
— Jaime Fuller (@j_fuller) May 21, 2013

"A man with a camera mounted on the handlebars of his bicycle lifted up the bike in order to film Weiner walking." capitalnewyork.com/article/politi…
— Jaime Fuller (@j_fuller) May 23, 2013

As The American Prospect goes, so goes the American prospect?

Answering The American Prospect's call to readers to help save the magazine from extinction, I donated some money and subscribed.  Honestly, I don't know if I'd ever even seen the print edition before my first issue arrived a couple of days ago. May it not be the last!  It's "The Poverty Issue," taking grim stock five decades after the U.S. declared war on poverty, and it's terrific.

Mark Levinson, writing about measurement of poverty, gives us to understand that by the most credible measures, there are currently between 69 and 100 million poor people in America. Roughly one third to one quarter of the nation is, if no longer ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished, still unable to meet a Basic Needs Budget with any consistency.  Peter Edelman, Bill Clinton's onetime Assistant HHS Secretary who resigned in protest when Clinton signed the Republican welfare reform law (which Edelman reminds us, knocked 10 million people off the welfare rolls), examines why the percentage of Americans in poverty stalled for 30 years after 1970 and backslid in the past decade -- mainly because "well-paying industrial jobs disappeared to other countries  and to automation"  and because we allowed unions' strength to erode rather than to migrate to the kinds of jobs that have filled the void.

Edelman offers various policy prescriptions to rebuild the middle class, and the article headline insists, "..We Can Solve This." While that would doubtless be true for a government with the desire and freedom to act, it's hard to imagine this generation of Americans mustering a fraction of the political will that would be required: