GREENSBORO Even at their best, Medicaid and health care reforms seem like a complicated mess.

Throw in years of questionable state software projects, damning audits and one of the most complex pieces of federal legislation in history President Barack Obamas health care overhaul is intrinsically tied to Medicaid and the whole thing becomes nigh impossible to follow.

The bottom line of the past few weeks is that the Republicans in control of the N.C. General Assembly and the governors mansion have decided not to cooperate with two key elements of the presidents reforms.

Instead of partnering with the federal government on new health insurance exchanges, which for users will seem a lot like a travel website for insurance, state leaders will let the federal government handle it alone.

And instead of expanding Medicaid to cover an estimated 500,000 additional people, they simply wont, leaving many North Carolinians without health insurance and saving the federal government billions of dollars.Continue Reading

For those who want a deeper understanding, weve tried to lay things out below. For you true policy wonks out there: This is not absolutely everything you need to know to run Medicaid and health care reform. For the rest of you, this will more than get you started. Embrace the acronyms. Keep patience at hand. Dig in.

The basics

Medicaid is government health insurance. It mostly covers children, the disabled and poor senior citizens. It costs about $14 billion a year in North Carolina and helps roughly 1.6 million people.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed Congress in 2010 and survived a U.S. Supreme Court test last year.

Well, it survived for the most part, but more on that later. Its sometimes called ACA, or just health reform. Youve also heard it called, derisively or not, Obamacare.

Read the rest here:

Health care reforms: What’s in store in N.C.?