The benefits of Medicaid expansion are only opportunities – they will not be achieved without sufficient resources. Our main concern is that no funds were allocated in the governor’s budget for outreach, marketing, and contracts with community-based organizations to reach the uninsured and help them fill out the application.

The combination of the Medicaid expansion and the premium subsidies that will be available in the exchange under the Affordable Care Act should result in a major positive economic and health impact in the state. However, the real promise of this legislation will not be achieved unless there is effective outreach.

The administration has had over two years and about $9 million of federal funding to study the ways to make an exchange work best for New Jerseyans. It has decided that not only should the federal government have primary responsibility, the state should have no responsibility. This hands-off policy is a big change for a state that under both Democratic and Republican governors has been in the forefront in protecting consumers and providing affordable health coverage to uninsured children, families and people with disabilities.

Moving forward, this report makes clear that New Jersey needs to not only heed the lessons of past mistakes, but also needs to reorient the focus of policymakers from tax cuts and smaller government to a new path, one that focuses on investment and opportunity.

It is absolutely critical that the governor opt to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The impact of this action on New Jersey would be overwhelmingly positive both from a fiscal and health perspective. On the other hand, failure to opt for the expansion will adversely affect the state budget, hospitals, small businesses and the growing number of uninsured who desperately need health coverage

With President Obama’s re-election, attention now turns to one of its immediate implications – looming health care reform deadlines facing Gov. Christie.

If New Jersey does not move quickly and provide enhanced, intensive outreach, over 100,000 uninsured people will not obtain health coverage in 2014. Furthermore, up to $470 million will be lost in federal funding for Medicaid and exchange subsidies, not to mention millions in funds to plan the exchange.

The latest jobs numbers for New Jersey merely reaffirm the basic fact that we’ve known for months: we are recovering from the Great Recession much more slowly than the rest of the nation.

The latest jobs report is very bad news for New Jersey. With unemployment now the highest its been since April 1977, this report confirms the fragility of the state’s crawl out of the recession.

What good is giving up state money that could be spent on infrastructure or education when the company in question is actually going to eliminate jobs in the state?