Before Hillary Clinton suggested the federal government keep fully paying for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, a leading Democratic pollster suggested the policy as a way to create jobs and help people in Republican-led states.
Several months before Clinton launched her presidential race in spring 2015, pollster John Anzalone raised an idea she later proposed: Instead of phasing down the federal match for newly eligible Medicaid recipients, the federal government would keep paying 100 percent of their costs.
“We have big shortages in healthcare workers,” Anzalone wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta on Feb. 1, 2015, in illegally obtained emails released Tuesday by Wikileaks. “These are good-paying jobs.”
“One idea I had was also to just have the federal gov’t come up with the 10% match they are requiring states to pitch in for Medicaid expansion under Obamacare,” Anzalone wrote. “This is clearly making winners and losers for working families. If you live in a red state with a GOP governor you are screwed. So just pay for the Medicaid expansion for states and create literally hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
Nineteen states, all of them led by Republicans opposed to Obamacare, have refused to accept the law’s Medicaid expansion. The federal government initially covered the full cost of the new enrollees, but that phases down to 90 percent by 2020. The Clinton campaign has proposed giving states the full 100 percent match for an additional three years, in hopes of convincing the remaining states to expand.
