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Now welcome to the award-winning BestOfTheLifE podcast with Cupsade from the David Pakman

show, The Young Turks, The BBC, The Tom Harman program on the media, Activism from Best

Of The Left, Counter-Spin and The RalphMater Radio Hour.

And if I am doing my job well, I expect you will come out of this one with decidedly

mixed feelings.

The Republican governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, has done a lot of really bad things as

governor.

One of the few good things that she has done that we can point to has been not to fall

to right-wing pressure to resist the Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care

Act in her state, but to actually participate in the Medicaid expansion.

And we now are starting to get data about the results of that expansion, and the data

predictably show that hospitals have started to save money as a result of this Medicaid

expansion that took place.

The uncompensated care at hospitals has decreased, and this has been driven by low-income and

uninsured people who can't pay for their hospital bills now being covered by Medicaid.

After Arizona, back in 2011, removed childless adults from the Medicaid program, the amount

of uncompensated care absolutely skyrocketed.

And if you know anything about basic logic and reason, just because a hospital bills someone

for care, if they are uninsured, the odds that you will ever collect for having provided

that care are obviously lower than for someone who has insurance.

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