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I got an email a few days ago asking whether the Medicaid expansion included in the healthcare reform bill would blow up state Medicaid budgets. I answered it and then forgot about it. Or I would have, anyway, except that we have an election for governor this year in California and Silicon Valley zillionaire Steve Poizner keeps running ads on my TV accusing Silicon Valley zillionaire Meg Whitman of, somehow, supporting Obamacare, which will blow up the state budget. Poizner’s attack doesn’t even make sense — it’s just another round of these two moderate Republicans denouncing each other for being too liberal — but still: will Obamacare blow up state budgets? Basically, the answer is no:

The federal government will assume 100 percent of the Medicaid costs of covering newly eligible individuals for the first three years (2014-2016). Federal support will phase down slightly over the following several years, so that for 2020 and all subsequent years, the federal government is responsible for 90 percent of the costs of covering these individuals. According to CBO, over the next ten years, the federal government will pay $434 billion of the cost of the Medicaid expansion, while the states will pay roughly $20 billion.

So it won’t cost states an extra dime through 2016, by which time our recession will presumably be over, and even after that states will only pay for a tiny fraction of the increased costs. As CBPP points out, states will pay about 4% of the total costs of Medicaid expansion over the next ten years. This represents an increase in overall state Medicaid spending of slightly over 1%.

Put another way, that $20 billion in state spending will insure an additional 16 million people, which works out to a cost per person of $125 per year over the next decade.  That’s a pretty good deal. And not exactly fiscal Armageddon.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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