Obama visits Baton Rouge to tout Medicaid expansion, hold town hall

The proposal, to be included in the president’s 2017 budget blueprint, comes as Obama visits Louisiana, which is poised to become the 31st state to offer Medicaid coverage to all its residents.

Edwards signed an executive order Tuesday calling for the state Department of Health and Hospitals to make the changes necessary to begin expanding Medicaid. Those incentives consist essentially of the same deal extended to states that have already expanded Medicaid: The federal government pays 100 percent of the expansion costs for the first three years, and 90 percent of the costs after that.

Obama will discuss his proposal on Thursday at a town hall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where newly sworn-in Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards said he would expand the program, providing coverage to an estimated 22,000 low-income people.

Obama will be speaking tomorrow at McKinley Senior High School, and it is still unclear whether Edwards and Obama will actually have a sit-down meeting with one another. And the program is growing rapidly, thanks largely to the law, which provides hundreds of billions of dollars of federal aid to states to expand Medicaid eligibility to low-income, working-age adults.

Asked if he plans to present Obama with a list of Louisiana’s needs, Edwards said, “Damn right”.

Obama’s trip will highlight progress made over the last seven years – specifically the Affordable Care Act.

But the plan seems unlikely to gain the backing of the Republican-led Congress, which has voted numerous times to repeal the health law.

The new governor said he wants to have government-funded health insurance cards in more people’s hands by July 1. “He’s already delivering for the people of Louisiana”, Obama said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the state’s majority-Republican Legislature would try to block it.

“This decision will give our residents access to preventive care, reduce the need for expansive emergency room care and provide Louisianans peace of mind that if they get sick they will get the health care they deserve without going bankrupt”, Denise Bottcher, Louisiana state director of AARP, said in a statement.

Jindal, a former 2016 presidential candidate whose term ended this week, refused to expand the program. It’s part of his tradition of traveling the country the day after the State of the Union address.

President Obama came in from Omaha, Nebraska.