Campaigning for the 1 percent.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

It's incredible that Republicans are running for office on the idea that the rich need more tax shelters and the poor need less health care.

But they are.

As Mitt Romney refuses to release information about his offshore accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, and Republicans in Congress vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act and make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the top 1 percent, governors across the country are taking a principled stand against allowing poor people to get federally funded health insurance.

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Rick Perry, governor of Texas--the state with the highest rate of uninsured citizens in the nation--proudly announced that he will join the Republican governors of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Wisconsin in withholding health care from the poor by rejecting the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion.

"If anyone had any doubt, we wanted to put it clearly to bed that Texas wasn't going to be a part of expanding socializing of our medicine," Perry said on--where else?--Fox News. "So we're not going to participate in any exchanges. We're not going to expand Medicaid."

Under the Affordable Care Act, states can extend Medicaid coverage

to people who earn up to 133 percent of the poverty level.

If some states refuse to extend Medicaid, "a shocking inequity will arise," says Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The worst hit will be people with incomes below the poverty line.

People making 100 to 400 percent of the poverty line get subsidies under the new law to help them afford the new health insurance exchanges.

But in the typical state, working parents lose Medicaid eligibility at just 63 percent of the poverty line, Greenstein explains. If they are unemployed, they lose coverage at a mere 37 percent of poverty. People in these two groups would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the Medicaid expansion. But in states that refuse to implement the Medicaid expansion, they "will be ineligible for both Medicaid and subsidies to purchase coverage in the exchanges; their incomes will be too high for the former and too low for the latter," says Greenstein.

The real travesty is that accepting the health insurance expansion offered under the Affordable Care Act costs the states practically nothing. The federal government pays 100 percent in the first three years and gradually reduces that to 90 percent in future years. It's a great deal for the states.

But the...