KHN: Kaiser Health News

Americans are broadly supportive of the health care law’s expansion of Medicaid to cover millions of uninsured people, according to a new poll.  But they are less enthusiastic about expanding it in their own states after they realize state taxpayers will pick up some of the cost.

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of the Affordable Care Act, but allowed states to opt out of the law’s plan to enlarge Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor. The law directed states to cover those earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $14,800 for individuals and $25,400 for a family of three, far above the levels currently covered by Medicaid in most states. Officials in several Republican states, including Florida, Louisiana and Texas, have said they don’t want to participate.

Nationally, two out of three people surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they had a favorable view of expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income uninsured adults. (KHN is an independent program of the foundation.) As has been the case with the law generally, the views reflected partisan viewpoints, with 87 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of independents favoring the expansion. Among Republicans 39 percent favored the expansion as a general concept, more than three times as many as said they like the law.

However, support dissipated — especially among Republicans – when people were asked whether their own state should participate and were told state taxpayers would eventually pay a tenth of the cost. When the question was phrased that way, only 49 percent favored their own state expanding Medicaid, while 43 percent said their state should keep the program unchanged. Two-thirds of Republicans opposed expanding Medicaid in their own state.

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Health insurance is getting almost as much attention as the debate over gun control in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., theater shootings, amid reports that some of the most grievously injured lack coverage.

“This does seem like a new part of the conversation” following a tragedy, said Dr. Ned Calonge, president and CEO of the Colorado Trust, a health care advocacy group.

Fifty-eight injured were taken to area hospitals after the shootings in the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.”  The most seriously wounded continue to fight for their lives and may face medical bills in the hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.  Among them is 23-year-old Caleb Medley, who is in an induced coma after being shot in the head, and whose wife, Katie, gave birth to their first child last week. The couple has no health insurance, and their friends and family are raising money online to pay their medical bills.

Like Medley, many of the victims are between the ages of 19 and 34 – a group with a 28 percent uninsurance rate in Colorado, the highest among any age group, according to a 2011 survey by Calonge’s group.

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Performers pay tribute to the National Health Service during the Opening Ceremony in London (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images).

The opening ceremony for the London Olympics Friday night was full of surprises: The “queen” parachuting with James Bond into the Olympic stadium, an appearance by the evil Voldemort of Harry Potter fame. But maybe the most surprising for health wonks was the tribute to the National Health Service (NHS).

That last salute came in a whimsical segment that organizers said honored “two of Britain’s greatest achievements: its amazing body of children’s literature and its National Health Service.” It was part of the highly choreographed section of the program that explored British history and achievements.

Academy Award filmmaker Danny Boyle, who was the artistic director for the opening ceremony, cast 600 dancers in the tribute that featured scores of children on hospital beds that were transformed into trampolines.  They were supervised by nurses in bright blue dresses with white aprons and doctors. The adults were largely volunteers who are employed in their regular lives by the NHS. As the children fell asleep, their dreams turned into nightmares with villains from British children’s literature. But Mary Poppins arrived shortly to calm the situation.

In a media guide, the ceremony organizers said, “The NHS is the institution which more than any other unites our nation. It was founded just after World War II on Aneurin Bevan’s famous principle, ‘No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.’ ”

The publicly funded program offers health care to millions of British residents and employs 1.7 million people. But even the revered NHS is coming under pressure and some health care experts are calling for overhauling parts of the service.