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2014 U. Ill. L. Rev. Online 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/uilro2014 and id is 1 raw text is: MEDICAID EXPANSION AS COMPLETION OF THE GREAT SOCIETY Nicole Huberfeld* Jessica L. Roberts** I. INTRODUCTION But there is another tradition that we share today. It calls upon us never to be indifferent toward despair. It commands us never to turn away from helplessness. It directs us never to ignore or to spurn those who suffer untended in a land that is bursting with abundance.' On the doorstep of its fiftieth anniversary, Medicaid at last could achieve the ambitious goals President Lyndon B. Johnson enunciated for the Great Society upon signing Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965. Although the spotlight shone on Medicare at the time, Medicaid was the sleeper program that caught America's neediest in its safety net-but only some of them.2 Medicaid's exclusion of childless adults and other undeserving poor loaned an air of otherness to enrollees, contrib- uting to its stigma and seeming political fragility. Now, Medicaid touches every American life. One in five Americans benefits from Medicaid's healthcare coverage,' and that number soon will increase to one in four due to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).' For its first forty-nine years, Medicaid covered only about forty percent of the nation's poor; the ACA is a fulcrum for Medicaid, tipping the old limited medical welfare program to a universal social insurance program. Medi- * H. Wendcll Cherry Professor of Law, University of Kentucky. Assistant Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center. 1. President Lyndon B. Johnson, Statement by the President of the United States Following Passage of the Medicare Bill by the Senate 22 (July 9, 1965), available at https://www.cms.gov/About- CMS/Agency-Information/History/downloads/CMSPresidentsSpeches.pdf. 2. Rosemary Stevens & Robert Stevens, Medicaid: Anatomy of a Dilemma, 35 L. & CONTEMP. PROBS. 348, 348 (1971). 3. See Medicaid & CHIP: April 2014 Monthly Applications, Eligibility Determinations, and En- rollment Report, CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES 3 (June 4, 2014), http://www.medticaidt.gov/AffordlableCareAct/Medticaid-Moving-Forward-2014/Downloads/April-2014- Enrollment-Report.pdf. 4. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119 (2010) (codified as amended in scattered titles of the U.S. Code). 1

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