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“Right now we’re turning away $2 billion per year,” Sen. Floyd McKissick (D-Durham) <br />told a room full of advocates at a press conference Tuesday morning. “That’s $2 billion <br />that’s being contributed to the federal government in Washington and it’s not coming <br />back to our state because we have refused to expand Medicaid.” <br />McKissick noted that Congress’ failure to repeal the law last month means the ACA <br />remains the “law of the land,” but he said that it might not be the ca se for long. <br />“They’ll keep working on it, they’ll keep tinkering with it, they’ll keep doing something <br />with it likely, that at some point may decrease our chance to expand Medicaid,” he said. <br />Uncovered health care workers <br />One irony of starting her own business, said Nancy Ruffner, was that even though she <br />helps people navigate the complicated healthcare system, she is unable to afford <br />insurance for herself. <br />Small change <br />Currently, 31 states have chosen to expand Medicaid, many of those states are <br />controlled by Republicans who initially opposed the legislation. <br />But the money was too good for many Republican governors and legislatures to resist. <br />And now some are even fans, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who told NBC’s Meet <br />the Press that Republicans in Congress should not kill Medicaid expansion. <br />“You have to have the ability to subsidize people at lower income levels,” he said. <br />A report generated by Ohio’s Department of Medicaid found it saved money even as it <br />improved the health of about 700,000 of beneficiaries. <br />Under pressure from governors such as Kasich, the Congressional American Health <br />Care Act would have allowed states that had expanded the program to continue <br />covering those extra people. <br />But the states, such as North Carolina, that didn’t expand Medicaid would receive $10 <br />billion to split among themselves over three years. An analysis by North Carolina <br />Institute of Medicine head Adam Zolotor calculated North Carolina’s share of that <br />money would come to about $172 million per year, while expansion would have brought <br />at least $2.5 billion to the state annually.