Coronavirus crisis makes it clearer than ever that Missouri needs Medicaid expansion

Across the state, in communities both rural and urban, nearly 350,000 Missourians signed petitions asking our politicians to let voters decide on Medicaid expansion in the November general election. Those signatures were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic tragically reminded us that access to health care is literally a matter of life or death.

Our nation’s experience with the coronavirus underscores that access to health care is paramount. While COVID-19 did not create health disparities, it certainly illuminated a persistent theme of the American health care system: inequity.

COVID-19 has laid bare the harsh consequences of the systemic and structural imbalance of power, money and resources that disproportionately affects people of color and people living in poverty, an unfortunate common denominator that cuts across rural and urban Missouri.

Too many Missourians are employed in jobs that make safe social distancing impossible. Too many have lost jobs and health insurance as businesses closed. Too many of those who kept their jobs lack paid sick leave. Too many are experiencing increased social isolation and a loss of learning because they don’t have access to the digital world.

These and other inequities make too many of our fellow Missourians more susceptible to the negative health and economic consequences of the pandemic. As we move forward, this crisis provides us with the chance to emerge as a healthier and more equitable state.

Ensuring Missourians have access to health care was the right thing to do before this public health crisis. More than ever, it’s the obvious path forward, and an achievable first step in Missouri’s stabilization and recovery from the pandemic.

Many Missouri families are slipping through the cracks of our health care system — forced to choose between paying for medical care and putting food on the table or making a housing payment. These families fall into the coverage gap, earning too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford private insurance.

In 2019, researchers determined that an estimated 230,000 Missourians would benefit from Medicaid expansion, with eligibility limited to individuals earning less than $18,000 a year. The number of people who stand to gain undoubtedly will increase as pandemic-driven job losses grow.

Medicaid expansion would make our families healthier, our communities safer and our economy stronger. It would help keep rural hospitals open, create thousands of new jobs and extend lifesaving care to hundreds of thousands of hardworking Missourians whose jobs don’t provide insurance.

That includes Missourians on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak: essential low-wage workers in grocery stores, delivery drivers, and home health aides in nursing homes, hospitals and elsewhere.

Health Forward Foundation, a public charity based in Kansas City, has long supported Medicaid expansion in both Kansas and Missouri, joining the Healthcare for Missouri coalition when it launched nearly eight months ago.

Thirty-six other states have already expanded Medicaid, including the Missouri border states of Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska and Iowa. So did neighboring Arkansas, where officials used savings from expansion to cut state income taxes for the middle class and reduce payments previously allocated for the uninsured.

Every one of those three dozen states that have expanded Medicaid has chosen to keep the program in place — in no small part because of its positive economic outcomes.

With Healthcare for Missouri submitting nearly twice as many signatures from Missourians as required on May 1 to get Medicaid expansion on the ballot, we and other supporters eagerly await verification and validation by the secretary of state and local election officials.

Expanding Medicaid in Missouri is both a vital forward step in our ongoing effort to eliminate disparities in health care access and a critical next step on the road to economic recovery.

Qiana Thomason is president and CEO of Health Forward Foundation, a nonprofit public charity in Kansas City.

This story was originally published May 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Coronavirus crisis makes it clearer than ever that Missouri needs Medicaid expansion."