Nearly 568,000 uninsured people who have been diagnosed with a serious mental health condition would have received treatment in 2014 if their states had chosen to expand Medicaid, according to the American Mental Health Counselors Association, a professional organization that does advocacy and education. That’s one in five of the nearly 3 million uninsured adults with serious mental health conditions who live in the 24 states that did not expand Medicaid last year. That treatment would have been fully paid for by the federal government.
Obamacare extended Medicaid to anyone whose income is below 138 percent of the federal poverty line ($15,521 for an individual last year), with the federal government paying 100 percent of the cost of insuring new enrollees for three years. But after a 2012 Supreme Court ruling gave states the option of not expanding Medicaid eligibility, some states elected to continue receiving “traditional” Medicaid, rather than accept the expanded funds. In 2014, 24 states went this route. The report accuses those states of rejecting Medicaid coverage “based on ideological intransigence – not health or fiscal interests.”