Governor Rick Perry has made his opposition to “Obamacare” known. He is against the policy and said Texas will not expand Medicaid. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the health care reform law, but gave states the option to expand Medicaid to implement it. The Texas Tribune published a story on the election’s impact on Texas Medicaid. An excerpt:
Gov. Rick Perry says Texas will opt-out of that expansion. But Anne Dunkelberg of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a liberal state policy think-tank, says the state’s largest counties — which have the most to gain monetarily from joining the program — may band together to force the expansion.
“I don’t see them doing an end run,” Dunkelberg said. “I do see them potentially coming together and trying to figure out if there is a way outside of the basic state budget general revenue system that they can come up with the rather modest, less than a billion dollars a year, that the state would need to do this expansion.”
A conservative group mentioned in the story believes states would do a better job with Medicaid block grants rather than having the federal government-run health care system.
