Chronicle: Perry's Refusal of Medicaid Equals Nocare

Yesterday's editorial from the Houston Chronicle takes Governor Rick Perry to task for refusing Medicaid for uninsured Texans under the Affordable Care Act.

OK, we get it: Gov. Rick Perry hates, hates, hates Obamacare. He despises it so much that he's willing to turn down a federal subsidy that would have extended Medicaid to almost 1.5 million uninsured Texans below the poverty line - people whose unpaid emergency-room bills have to be covered by other Texans via insurance premiums and property-tax dollars. Republicans argue that Medicaid is a broken system. But if Texas Medicaid is broken, it's because Texas broke it. Our state, not the feds, controls matters such as the amount doctors are paid, the complexity of the paperwork involved and efforts to crack down on fraud. If Texas wanted to fix Medicaid, it could.
 
Or maybe Perry can do better than Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid. It seems unlikely. When he ran for president, he threw out vague words like "freedom" and "innovation," but his ideas about the American health care crisis were limited to touting tort reform and the underfunded little Healthy Texas program. (We'd never heard of it before, either. It subsidizes private insurance for small companies, but hasn't made a dent in our state's problem.) Basically, Perrycare meant Nocare.

Rick Perry is as crassly ambitious and venal as any current political figure.  His clear priority is advancing his own political interests which, amazingly, appear to involve a 2016 Presidential run even after embarassing himself and the state of Texas with his 2012 clown show. His obvious strategy in pursuit of the Republican nomination is to pander to the extreme right.  Perry seems completely untroubled by the cost of his anti-Obama posturing to the state and its uninsured.