Submitted by BlueNC on Sun, 03/14/2021 - 09:26 TAKE THE MONEY. IT'S OURS. EXPAND MEDICAID: There are no good reasons for North Carolina not to expand Medicaid coverage to as many as 650,000 North Carolinians who now lack affordable access to health care. It remains irrational that the General Assembly continues the ban on such expansion – particularly in the midst of the worst health pandemic the state and nation has seen in a century. How many of the 11,552 heart-breaking COVID-19 deaths might have been avoided? North Carolina’s eight-year failure to expand Medicaid has cost the state about $15 billion in lost federal funds. That is money that North Carolina taxpayers are not getting brought back into the state that would have provided nearly 84,000 annual mammograms, helped support struggling rural hospitals and created more than 100,000 jobs. The federal COVID-19 relief legislation that appears to be headed to the president offers North Carolina between $1.7 billion and $2.4 billion in ADDITIONAL federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP) funds over two years – that would be on top of the cost of covering Medicaid expansion.