Obamacare has been sparking a lot of controversies lately. Long before Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. changed his mind about Medicaid, Republicans opposed it the best way they can. Now, more and more Republican governors are shouting their states will not expand Medicaid programs. Rick Perry is one of them and he says Texas is not implementing Obamacare.
Unfortunately for Obama, the Supreme Court ruled last week that states have the option not to implement Medicaid expansion programs if they don’t want to. That’s all the endorsement Republican governors needed. Texas’s Rick Perry joins Florida’s Rick Scott, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley.
“We in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamcare” said the former Republican presidential candidate. “I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our Constitution and our founding principles of limited government” reads Perry’s statement.
Rick Perry told Fox News in an exclusive interview: “If anyone had any doubt, we wanted to put it clearly to bed that Texas wasn’t going to be a part of expanding socializing of our medicine”. The governor was firm about not expanding Medicaid in Texas or participating in any exchanges.
From his point of view, “Medicaid is a failed program”. “To expand this program is not unlike adding a thousand people to the Titanic. You’re going to further drive this country into debt” said Rick Perry.
The Texas governor slammed Medicaid as “a system of inflexible mandates, one-size-fits-all requirements, and wasteful, bureaucratic inefficiencies”. In his letter to Kathleen Sebelius, Health and Human Services Secretary, Rick Perry also added: “Expanding it as the PPACA provides would only exacerbate the failure of the current system, and would threaten even Texas with financial ruin”.
In his interview with Fox News, the Texas governor suggested that the federal government should try to find other solutions to the present day healthcare needs. “I can assure you that Texas and other states would find more effective, efficient ways to deliver healthcare to their citizens and do it in a way that preserves those individuals freedom”.
