Video: KVUE Austin
Becca Aaronson & David Maly, Texas Tribune
While visiting Austin to highlight health insurance enrollment efforts under the federal Affordable Care Act, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius acknowledged Friday that the online marketplace still isn’t working smoothly and criticized some Texas leaders for continuing to mount a political campaign against the law.
“It’s unfortunate that it is still being conducted as a political campaign and not as the law,” she said in an interview with the Tribune. “This is no longer a political debate; it’s the law of the land.”
Sebelius acknowledged that the success of the law hinges on enrollment efforts in Texas, which has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation — a quarter of the state’s population, roughly 6 million people, are uninsured. Health care advocates and local elected officials across the state are working to educate Texans about their health care options in the federal marketplace, Sebelius said. But the political backlash promulgated by state leaders, including Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, “has come with a lot of fear and misinformation, and that is a difficult atmosphere for people to understand a new program.”
Critics of the law have said that insurance premiums would ultimately climb and that businesses would cut back on employee hours or reduce existing health benefits. Even proponents of the law, such as state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, have said technical problems need to be resolved because they are discouraging Texans from enrolling.
“With Secretary Sebelius in Texas today, she should keep in mind three things: Texans believe our federal government should be accountable, transparent and limited,” U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a statement. “If she’s still confused about who exactly she works for and if she hasn’t come ready to answer questions about why hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on a botched product, she might as well not visit.”
The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, requires most Texans to carry health insurance beginning in 2014. The online health insurance marketplace that the federal government launched on Oct. 1 offers dozens of health plans and sliding-scale tax credits to help poor individuals and families purchase coverage, but it has been plagued with problems tied to the initiative’s website.