I voted to stop President Trump from ending the Medicaid expansion, and I’m not the only one.
But if we can all do this, maybe other members of Congress can too.
Here’s why.
The story is part of Politico’s special series on the impact of Obamacare repeal and its impact on the country’s health care.
I was born in New York and raised in the Bronx.
I grew up with the Affordable Care Act, the health care law passed in 2010 to expand coverage to millions of people in the nation’s poorest states.
When I graduated from the University of New York in 2012, I signed up for Medicaid.
I couldn’t afford to buy insurance at my own pace, so I went to work for the government.
When Obamacare went into effect, I enrolled in Medicaid for the first time.
I have two children, and the state of New Jersey gave me an additional $7,000 to pay for my family’s coverage.
I can’t get enough.
After my first year of Medicaid, I lost my job, my home, my health care coverage.
When Medicaid ended, I had to find new jobs.
I lost track of how much I made.
My wife lost her job.
We had a baby and two of our children were sick.
I had nowhere to go.
I became an advocate for my fellow New Yorkers.
I started working for the New York City Board of Health, the city agency that oversees the Medicaid program.
In 2013, the state’s Medicaid agency was looking to expand Medicaid coverage in the city’s poorest areas.
So I went into work to help them.
By 2015, I was a consultant, and by 2016, I got my first paycheck from the state.
The state had set aside $2.8 billion for expansion in the first year, and now I was making $9.75 an hour.
And my wife?
We had to pay off her loan, which was $9,000.
She was on food stamps.
We were struggling financially.
I knew it would be hard to keep working.
But I felt obligated to do it.
In June 2017, I started the American Civil Liberties Union’s New York State Campaign to End Medicaid Expansion.
The law was an important step toward getting health insurance to more people.
But it was also about protecting the poorest people.
It was also designed to protect people from predatory lenders, the people who would try to take advantage of vulnerable people.
I got to see how vulnerable people are in their lives, and my job was to help people who are most vulnerable in the system to get access to the help they need.
I saw the devastating impact of Medicaid on people like me.
And I wanted to help.
As the New Yorkers who worked with me on Medicaid expanded became more successful, they also saw how vulnerable our country’s poorest people are.
One of the first people they heard from was the mother of my children, who was in her 60s.
She told me that her Medicaid payments were going up by $2,000 a month, because her employer stopped paying her Medicaid benefits in 2020.
She also found that she was losing her job because she couldn’t keep up with her bills.
In 2018, I heard from a young man who had lost his job as a teacher in the Newburgh School District in Upstate New York.
He had lost Medicaid coverage to pay his bills, and his son needed a place to live.
We heard from another mother who lost her home to foreclosure because of Medicaid.
These women and men were fighting for what’s called the “right to work,” which means that people who work full time get paid the same as someone who does part time work.
But when you look at the numbers, you realize that these people are getting a much lower rate of health insurance coverage.
In 2016, there were about 6 million people in New England who had Medicaid coverage.
Now there are about 5.5 million.
By 2022, about 2.2 million people will have Medicaid coverage through the expansion.
The expansion’s impact on New York’s poorest residents is staggering.
The number of uninsured people has risen by 70 percent in the last decade.
New York has lost more people to foreclosure than any other state.
And that means that it’s paying a larger share of its Medicaid costs to the poorest residents of New England than to its richest residents.
As of 2019, the federal government paid $11.3 billion to Medicaid beneficiaries in New Jersey.
That’s nearly four times as much as the state spends on Medicaid each year.
In New York, Medicaid covers about 5 million people.
And when we compare those Medicaid costs with the costs of other federal programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it’s striking.
Medicaid pays more than 2.8 million people an average of $1,817 a month.
By contrast, the government spends just $639 on health insurance for people earning $25,000 or less.
By 2026, Medicaid is projected to cover more than
