Pending Piece of Legislation
The concept of providing basic healthcare services individuals in need has undergone an agonizing transition, from a luxury once only afforded by the affluent to a basic human right granted to citizens of every economic station, and the recently enacted Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to finalize this ethical evolution. Reflecting perhaps the bitter political enmity currently consuming the nation's once cherished democratic process, Republican legislatures in states throughout the union have bristled at the ACA's primary provisions, threatening all manner of procedural protestation as they attempt to delay and derail the bill's eventual implementation. One of the most intriguing aspects of the sprawling, thousand page law, however, has been the stipulation that individual states will be given a choice to either accept federal funding to expand their statewide Medicaid roster, or to forfeit all federal funding for that program in perpetuity. This Faustian bargain of sorts was crafted by federal lawmakers to provide resistant states with an offer that could not be refused, but in the wake of President Obama's reelection to a second term in the land's highest office, the willingness of Republican-ran states to fall on their proverbial sword appears to have been vastly underestimated.