Coyote-and-criminal-killing governor of drunken idiocy Texas, Rick Perry, is not about to stand back and watch while his fellow wingnut governors from equally awful, deadbeat states steal all his thunder by rejecting the big, bad gubmint’s evil plans to expand Medicaid and help insure millions of Texans without access to medical coverage.
Aww, hell no! You see, Slick Rick ain’t never met a politically motivated, catastrophically bad decision he didn’t like, or a sensible, cost-reducing, life-saving plan he did.
That’s just the way Rick rolls.
“I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab,” he said in a statement. “Neither a ‘state’ exchange nor the expansion of Medicaid under this program would result in better ‘patient protection’ or in more ‘affordable care.’ They would only make Texas a mere appendage of the federal government when it comes to health care.”
In a malignant tumor kind of way.
From the Texas Tribune
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states — even Texas, which has the country’s highest rate of the uninsured — may not be punished for opting out of the Medicaid expansion. On Monday, Perry called it the equivalent of adding more people to a sinking Titanic.
Right, because providing 1.3 million people access to medical care while the federal government picks up 100% of the tab for at least the next five years and 90% for God knows how long after that, is totally like making the decision to send scores of innocent human beings to dark, watery graves in the middle of the Atlantic.
But Dan Stultz, president and CEO of the Texas Hospital Association, said that without the expansion, “many will remain uninsured, seeking care in emergency rooms, shifting costs to the privately insured and increasing uncompensated care to health care providers.”
“With a strained state budget, it’s hard to imagine addressing the uninsured problem in Texas without leveraging federal funds, which will now go to other states that choose to expand their Medicaid program.”
Imagine all the people (living). It’s easy if you try!
“If anyone was in doubt, we in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamacare,” Perry said in a statement. “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.”
Make that limited-intelligence government.
The Texas Democratic Party fired back quickly after Perry’s announcement, calling it “both cruel and negligent.”
“No person with a speck of intelligence would turn down billions in federal dollars that would be a boon to our economy and help Texans,” spokeswoman Rebecca Acuña said in a statement. “… Rick Perry’s Texas solution is to let Texans stay ill and uninsured. That is not a health care plan.”
Whatever. Stupid is as stupid dies.
It’s like they say in Texas, give me Liberty(Medical) or give me Death!
[image via Wonkette]