World News Korner

Success of Obamacare has forced Arkansas free clinic to close. Not exactly a bad thing.

Courtesy of TPM:

A medical clinic in Mena, Ark. announced that it would be closing, citing a large drop in need for the clinic as people have signed up for health insurance under Obamacare.

"Because people are qualifying for insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, our free medical clinic will not be needed anymore," Stacey Bowser, the director of the 9th Street Ministries Clinic, told the Mena Star.

"We’ve gone from seeing around 300 people a month on a regular basis, but as people were enrolling in Obamacare, the numbers we were seeing have dropped. We were down to 80 people that came through the medical clinic in February, all the way down to three people at the medical clinic in March. Our services won’t be needed anymore, and this will conclude our mission," she continued.

Bowser said that because the clinic was established to provide care to those without insurance, there are far fewer people who qualify for the missions's services, linking the drop in visitors to the health care law.

"This complete dropoff of numbers of people coming to the clinic is a result of all those who have successfully enrolled in an insurance policy now," she said.

Interestingly enough Arkansas, being a red state, did NOT expand Medicaid exactly.

What they did instead was a kind of work around.

Here is more from PBS:

The Arkansas experiment to use federal Medicaid dollars to help low-income people buy private health insurance plans will survive another year.

This “private option” of Medicaid expansion — which narrowly passed in the state’s House of Representatives on Tuesday after being rejected in four previous votes – allows those below 138 percent of the poverty level to enroll in plans like Blue Cross and Blue Shield through the state’s insurance exchange.

Many conservatives in the Republican-controlled legislature found that to be a much more palatable option than enrolling more people in the traditional Medicaid program, which they see as a broken and inefficient system that offers poor-quality care. Offering this alternative allowed Arkansas to bring billions of federal dollars into the state economy, while expanding coverage to some of the state’s sickest individuals and saving hospitals millions in uncompensated care costs.

Well whatever they have to call it, or how they have to spend the money, to help conservatives sleep at night, the bottom line is that previously uninsured people in Arkansas are now being covered to such an extent that the free clinic is no longer deemed necessary.

No matter how conservatives attempt to muddy the waters, THAT is the direct result of President Obama and the Democrats.

Which is something the people of Arkansas might want to keep in mind.

Source