New America Media, by Khalil Abdullah

Health care advocates and business groups, whose efforts failed to move Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas legislature to expand the state’s Medicaid population under the Affordable Care Act, are digging in for a protracted struggle that might extend until 2015 or beyond.

Had Medicaid expansion been enacted during the legislative session that ended last week, individuals earning between 0 and 138 percent of the federal poverty level (an individual earning up to roughly $15,000, or, for a family of four, up to $31,000) would have been eligible for Medicaid health coverage beginning in 2014. The federal government would have paid the entire cost of Texas’s expansion for the first three years through 2016, and 90 percent in years thereafter. …Read more