How the Supreme Court’s Obamacare Ruling Fails Poor Black Women With HIV

State discretion on Medicaid expansion is particularly troublesome for black women living with HIV, says C. Virginia Fields, CEO of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. “In six of the 26 states that brought the Supreme Court challenge, we have large pockets of Black women living in poverty and with AIDS: Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. We had hoped that the Medicaid expansion would allow uninsured women diagnosed with HIV to qualify for Medicaid sooner so that they would be able to receive [free or affordable] treatment before the onset of AIDS. Under the Supreme Court ruling, I doubt if there’s going to be any relaxing of those standards.”