Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will promote the health care law in Texas on Thursday, meeting with mayors and other stakeholders less than two months before Americans without employer-based health coverage start to enroll in state-based insurance markets.
She will discuss the law’s benefits with Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro in a bid to raise awareness about the state’s health care exchange, according to her agency.
But Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry and other conservatives in the Lone Star State do not like the Affordable Care Act and have rejected attempts to implement President Obama’s reforms, such as the expansion of the Medicaid program to those who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. They let the federal government to set up their exchange for them, instead of taking on the task.
In a statement, Mr. Perry said Thursday that Mrs. Sebelius shouldn’t be touring the state “to explain the increasingly convoluted and increasingly delayed implementation of the federal exchange system.”
“With due respect, the secretary and our president are missing the point: It’s not that Americans don’t understand Obamacare, it’s that we understand it all too well,” he said. “In Texas, we’ve been fighting Obamacare from the beginning, refusing to expand a broken Medicaid system and declining to set up a state health insurance exchange.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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