(Carrie Feibel, KUHF Public Radio)
Governor Rick Perry says he doesn’t want Texas to implement two major changes under President Obama’s healthcare law. The announcement troubles health advocates who say uninsured Texans need those two options.
The recent Supreme Court ruling allows states to choose whether to expand Medicaid, the government insurance for the very poorest Americans. The optional expansion would open Medicaid to people with incomes slightly higher than the poverty level.
Governor Perry says he won’t support that in Texas:
“It’s important to recognize that Medicaid is a broken system, and you can’t fix a broken system by pouring millions of more people into it. Already the cost of Medicaid is consuming more and more of the state budget.”
Public health advocates struck back, pointing out that the federal government is going to pay almost all the costs of allowing more Texans into Medicaid.
Anne Dunkelberg is with the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank in Austin.
“It concerns us deeply that this position is being taken and no solutions are being put forward to do anything about the 6.2 million uninsured Texans. Or to speak to the fact that we would be leaving $76 billion dollars in federal funds on the table, funds that will go to other states that do exercise the Medicaid expansion.”
State representative Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat, says Perry is being hypocritical since he accepts federal funds all the time, for instance, stimulus funds and disaster funds.
Perry also said he doesn’t want the state to set up a health exchange, a place for the uninsured to shop for policies online.
But as Dunkelberg points out, that creates a different political problem for the governor.
“As the governor knows, there will be a federally operated exchange in every state that doesn’t create its own one.”
(Hear the full story at KUHF Public Radio)
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