http://www.definitivehc.com/medicare-cms/why-some-states-declined-to-expand-medicaid?source=newsltr-blog&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11-22-16

The vast majority of healthcare organizations and professional groups support Medicaid expansion, the Obamacare initiative to widen eligibility for Medicaid to individuals earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level. To them, the benefits of expansion, such as less bad debt and uncollectible bills, better patient access to services, and an overall healthier patient population, outweigh the additional costs for states to bear after the full federal reimbursement period expires. But a subsequent Supreme Court ruling left the decision to implement Medicaid expansion up to the individual states. To date, 31 states and DC have implemented the expansion, the majority of them launching new Medicaid eligibility guidelines starting in 2014. Why hasn’t it been approved in the other 19? Often it is attributed to the state’s dominant political party, but that alone isn’t a reliable indicator, given that red states like Ohio and North Dakota expanded the program, while others like Maine and Virginia did not. Judging from a review of Definitive Healthcare data, there is another possibility: hospitals in non-expansion states were in a better financial position and so there was less political pressure to widen Medicaid eligibility.