But six months later, squeezed between his ambition to run for president and re-election in a majority blue state, he bucked his own party and took the money. There are now more than half a million poor people who gained access to healthcare in New Jersey.
“It was a very big move,” said Joel Cantor, director of the Rutgers Center for Health Policy. “Expanding Medicaid has been huge for this state, enfranchising hundreds of thousands of people and helping to finance our healthcare system more robustly and more stable than it had been in the past.”
Cantor praises Christie for adding access to healthcare for the poor and for doing a good job of implementing Obamacare.