"Cutting off your nose to spite Obama" :
Excerpts :
"At the state level, most Republican governors have refused to set up insurance exchanges, and many have refused to expand Medicaid, which is the primary vehicle for insuring those currently uninsured.
The question, though, is whether governors who purposefully do a very bad job implementing Obamacare will hurt the law or hurt themselves and their states. Call it the California versus Texas question.
Taking Action
In 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed into law two bills to establish the online insurance marketplace -- “exchanges” -- that are at the center of Obama’s health-care reform. In addition to being the first state to pass such legislation, California promptly accepted the law’s Medicaid expansion. By this time next year, when the expansion is fully under way, it’s possible that the portion of the state’s uninsured population will have declined from 20 percent to less than 5 percent.
In Texas, the situation is just the opposite. The Lone Star State isn’t lifting a finger to create an exchange, instead leaving the work to the federal government. Texas is refusing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, too. “The idea that we would expand and put more money and more people into a broken system is not unlike putting another 1,000 people on the Titanic,” Republican Governor Rick Perry told Forbes. “You know how this is going to turn out. And it’s going to be a disaster.”
One might observe that the health-care system in Texas, which has the nation’s highest rate of uninsured residents at 24 percent, is already a disaster. The recalcitrance of Perry and Republican state lawmakers has the potential to make matters much worse.
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Bloomberg.com
The Battle Over Obamacare Moves to the States
March 27, 2013
By Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is a columnist and blogger at The Washington Post and a policy analyst for MSNBC.
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