Texas Gov. Rick Perry Refuses To Implement ‘Obamacare’

From Talking Points Memo, courtesy of AlterNet:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Monday he will not implement ‘Obamacare’ provisions such as the Medicaid expansion and the insurance exchanges. The decision could mean that Texas ultimately loses an opportunity to cover half of its uninsured residents and relinquishes to the federal government more control over its health care system.

After informing the Obama administration of his intentions in a letter, Perry went on Fox News to explain his position. “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,” he said. “So we’re not going to participate in any exchanges. We’re not going to expand Medicaid.”

One in four Texans are uninsured, the highest rate of any state. The Medicaid expansion would cover 49.4 percent of uninsured Texans by 2019, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The program is broadened to cover Americans within 133 percent of the poverty line — currently the eligibility for a working Texan parent cuts off at 27 percent. The federal government will cover the full cost of the first three years and pay 90 percent thereafter.

More here.

If you didn't already think that the right wing is batshit crazy, this is some new evidence to consider. The Medicaid expansion would bring my home state's uninsured figure down to one eighth of the population, something that not only isn't otherwise on the horizon for Texas, but is also something Perry simply does not acknowledge as being an issue: later in the article, he brushes aside his state's dismal health care coverage figures by asserting that Texas has "some of the finest health care in the world." I guess so, if you can pay for it.

So is this about ideology that's so important that leaving large percentages of the population to die young is a price worth paying, or is about stupidity, insanity, or both? Actually, it's all stupidity and insanity. What kind of fucking ideology kills people just to make a point? Well, Nazism, or socialism as practiced by the Soviets or Khmer Rouge or the Red Chinese, to name a couple. The American right wing is in good company, that's for sure.

Fuck you poor. Fuck you self-employed. Capitalism's got nothing for you. Why don't you just go back to Russia, where you belong.

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