DN Editorial: An even more healthy PA

NEWLY elected governor Tom Wolf is clearly working on his to-do list.

He has already taken action on two big issues he campaigned on. Yesterday, he announced a proposal to impose a 5 percent fracking tax on those drilling for natural gas in the state.

And Monday, he announced that he has sent a letter to the feds withdrawing the state's participation in Healthy PA, a complicated Medicaid expansion alternative that former Gov. Tom Corbett enacted in the last months of his administration.

This is good news for the state's economy, since Medicaid expansion is expected to lead to job creation and economic activity (up to $5 billion, according to one report by Families USA). But it's especially good news for the 600,000 low-income people eligible for Medicaid.

The Healthy PA program was created after Corbett followed the lead of his Republican counterparts in other states and rejected the government's offer to help fund the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. In exchange for expanding Medicaid, the feds said that they would fund 100 percent of the costs of expansion in the first year, and 90 percent thereafter.

By all accounts, Corbett's complicated alternative program ran into glitches from the get-go. For example, according to an account in the Inquirer, drug-and-alcohol treatment and mental-health patients were locked out of treatment centers because of glitches in the new system. Other red tape and system problems began to emerge almost immediately with Healthy PA's implementation.

Scrapping that program will give the working poor easier access to health coverage.

It's unfortunate that millions of dollars had to be spent on something that was so quickly scrapped, especially given the state's less than healthy balance sheet. It's a good reminder of the dangers and costs of such partisan battles.

While the state's low-income population can breathe easier about getting more streamlined access to health care, there are still widespread attacks on the Affordable Care Act.

ACA is subject to ongoing Congressional threats to dismantle the law, but given the fact that 10 million have enrolled as of this month, killling Obamacare is a risky move. On the other hand, though, the Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case that many worry could threaten the underpinnings of ACA. The case, King v. Burwell, has to do with a linguistic glitch in the original law related to subsidies that some get in order to afford coverage. A number of recent reports suggest that one of the driving motivations for the suit is that more than one plaintiff believes that Obama is "the anti-Christ."

The fact that the wrong ruling by the Supreme Court could eliminate health coverage for 6 million doesn't appear to matter.

This country has grown increasingly divided, and one key division is health care approaches between Republican states - with no expanded Medicaid, and no state exchange that makes signing up for health coverage easier - and Democratic states, with expanded Medicaid coverage and state-run exchanges.

These bipartisan battles are not without their costs. We shouldn't underestimate the financial costs. But this battle over health care carries very human costs - not only in making a difference in the number of the healthy and the sick, but in coverage that could mean a difference between life and death.