A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by the New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the 8 million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years. Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

"How can somebody in poverty not be eligible for subsidies?" an unemployed health care worker in Virginia asked through tears. The woman, who identified herself only as Robin L., thought she had run into a computer problem when she went online and learned that she would not qualify.

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country's population, but about two-thirds of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country's uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses' aides. Opponents of the expansion say that they are against it on exclusively economic grounds.

"The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute," said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. "It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness."

new york times