Everybody baits Chris

Jennifer Stefano in 2010, via Robert Stacy McCain.

“Throw out the mandate, throw out the exchange,” Hayes then told her. “Bumping up Medicaid eligibility from 100 percent of poverty line to 133 percent of poverty line so that some working poor people can get some health insurance — what is the objection to that? Why does every conservative Republican governor oppose that? Explain that to me.”

“Number one, not true,” Stefano answered. “Plenty of Republican governors, including Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania, including [Ohio Gov. John Kasich], there are Republican governors that have expanded Medicaid. Please, please, please, spare me that this is a Republican-Democrat thing.”

“Do you believe in Medicaid expansion?” Hayes asked.

“I have a real problem, when you talk about raising the poverty level, that’s people making $94,000 a year,” she said. “They’re not poor. That is taking resources from the poor.”

“Not on the Medicaid expansion,” Hayes said, shaking his head. (Via Raw Story)

I actually saw this bizarre exchange on the tellyvision. I would just like to pause here to note, since people are not getting it, where in the Sargasso Sea of her mind Jennifer Stefano of the "Americans for Prosperity" (a wholly-owned subsidiary of David and Charles Koch) found that startling number: it's 400% of $23,500, the notional federal poverty line for a family of four. Indeed a family of four with an income of $94,000 is not poor, as you would expect if you multiplied the poverty rate by four, in the same way as if a small foot is defined as a foot of size five or lower, then a size-14 foot is not small. Nor is it regarded as poor by the folks who wrote and passed the Affordable Care Act. You do not get Medicaid under the ACA if you have an income of $94,000. You could get federal tax subsidies on an Obamacare exchange plan at anywhere under that income (and up around the $94,000 level they would not be especially generous subsidies), which is not the same thing.

You get Medicaid under the Act's new provisions if your family of four has an income of between $23,500 and $31,255 (I'm not hunting for links on this one, it is just simple arithmetic), and it has to be incredibly welcome. It is probably the single best thing about the ACA.

As for Stefano, who believes that all those welfare Cadillac queens out there have incomes of $94,000 as they steal free health care from honest taxpayers—I suppose she thinks of herself as middle class and just getting by on something more than that, with a Koch-paid salary and comparably compensated husband and no doubt a perfectly good health plan—to entertain a belief like that, just how Marie-Antoinette rich is the wrong end of the telescope from which you have to be peering?

Matcha green tea marble brioche from FoodBeam.