The governor? Rick Perry, not Pat Quinn. The state? Texas, not Illinois.
Illinois Governor Quinn excitedly announced that Illinois can't get enough Medicaid, so we're going all-in on the Obamacare health care exchanges. That's the opposite of what Texas Governor Rick Perry, who notified HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius Monday:
"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 in an exclusive interview with Fox News. "We're not going to participate in any exchanges, we're not going to expand Medicaid - we're just not going to be a part of, again, socializing healthcare in the state of Texas."
If Texas, or any other state, refuses to implement the health insurance exchanges, the federal government does have the power to implement the exchanges itself. But Perry criticized the idea of expanding what he says is a faulty program that will ultimately bankrupt states.
"Medicaid is a failed a program. To expand this program is not unlike adding a thousand people to the Titanic. You're going to further drive this country into debt," Perry said. "You don't expand a program that is not working already."
Perry said that the funding would be better spent allowing states to provide their own coverage.
Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2012/07/09/rick-perry-texas-wont-implement-obamacare#ixzz209GG7EVD
