What should Alaska do about Medicaid expansion?

As a follow up to my earlier post on medicaid, and a comment on the article on whether Alaska will participate in the expansion of Medicaid, I wanted to post my thoughts on whether we should expand Medicaid in Alaska.  For convenience, the link to the Alaska Dispatch article that got me on a tear is here:

Will Alaska Expand Medicaid? Health Care for Thousands at Stake | Alaska Dispatch

I've talked about this before, but like it or not, the insured, under our current system, pay for the health care of the uninsured. So thinking about this as "Freedom versus Obamacare" is simplistic, and (as I have said before) kind of stupid.  Yes, prior to the Affordable Care Act (and prior to the Supreme Court's decision upholding the individual mandate) we did have the right not to buy health insurance.  Which means that we had the right to not pay for our own health care when we got sick, instead, forcing the insured to pay for our care.

So, basically, without the individual mandate, we had the freedom to make everybody else pay for our health care.

So I guess that as long as we define "freedom" as "freedom to be a free-rider," it's true that the ACA can be boiled down to "freedom v. Obamacare".

However, most of the people who are without health insurance don't really feel free at all.  They're not free-riding on purpose.  Most of them would really love to have health insurance, but they can't afford it.

That's one reason why opting in to the Medicaid expansion is important.  Without doing so, we'll be forcing a lot of people to break the law, since they won't be able to afford expensive private health care on their own (even though we hope that the ACA and individual mandate will bring down the cost of health care by bringing more healthy people into the health insurance system).