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Gov. Rick Perry is preparing for yet another battle in his war against Obamacare.
In a letter to the state’s health agency on Monday, the governor laid out his plan to request a federal waiver to reform Medicaid as Texas sees fit — without expanding eligibility.
“Seemingly, the president and his administration are content to simply throw money at a problem and hope that any problems will resolve themselves,” Perry wrote in a Monday letter to Kyle Janek, the executive commissioner of Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission. “My response, and the response of the Texas Legislature, has been crystal clear: Texas will not expand Medicaid under Obamacare.”
Instead, Perry has asked that the agency request flexibility in the form of a block grant — a fixed amount of money, rather than matching dollars for Medicaid services — from the federal government to fundamentally reform Medicaid. Specifically, Perry requested that the agency seek a waiver that allows the state to make changes to the program without receiving federal approval, continue asset and resource testing to determine eligibility, and initiate cost-sharing initiatives, such as co-payments, premiums and deductibles, among other reforms.
The waiver “should give Texas the flexibility to transform our program into one that encourages personal responsibility, reduces dependence on the government, reins in program cost growth and efficiently improves coordination of care,” Perry wrote.
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In a second letter sent to HHSC on Monday, Perry requested that the agency develop a mechanism to continue collecting and analyzing income, asset and resource information on Texans who apply for Medicaid benefits. That’s despite a provision in the Affordable Care Act — one that takes effect on Jan. 1 — that requires the state to stop asset testing to determine Medicaid eligibility.
A copy of the letter requesting the block grant is here, and a copy of the letter on asset testing is here. Texas has been asking for a Medicaid block grant since at least 2008, when the Bush administration rejected the request. Perry knows full well what the answer will be, he’s just going through the motions out of spite and the continued delusion that he’ll be appealing to Iowa voters in 2016. If the CMS assigned me the task of writing the response, I’d start out by noting that in any negotiation, there must be good faith and a willingness to give something to get something. As the primary purpose of block granting Medicaid is the limit services, and the primary purpose of the Affordable Care Act is to enroll more people in health insurance plans, Perry’s proposal demonstrates neither of those things. Just this week, we’ve seen two examples of other Republican governors agreeing to expand Medicaid. They both wrung some concessions out of the feds in doing so, but the end result will be more people getting access to health care. And Lord knows, we need a commitment to providing access to health care in Texas.
Texas continued to have the highest rate of people without health insurance in 2012 at 24.6 percent, according to the Current Population Survey estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday.
“Texas has often had the highest uninsured rate throughout the country,” said David Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division. He added that additional data from the American Community Survey that the Census Bureau plans to release later this week would provide more specific information on health insurance rates in states and metropolitan areas.
The Current Population Survey estimates revealed that the national uninsured rate declined in 2012, to 15.4 percent from 15.7 percent in 2011. The national real median income and official poverty rate were not statistically different in 2011 and 2012, according to the estimates.
Thanks to the insurance exchanges and the ACA subsidies, Texas’ unacceptably high level of uninsured people will decline, though as always Perry is doing everything he can to keep as many Texans as possible sick and unable to do anything about it. Perry and his fellow Republicans just don’t give a damn about the problem. Until they do, I see no reason for the feds to waste any time on these pointless requests.
Long Perry short: “Give me a bunch of no-strings Federal money so we can spend it on finding new ways to prevent the poor from getting any of it.”
Technically, the Bush administration didn’t reject a block grant waiver request, it didn’t approve Perry’s request for a faulty high risk pool/private insurance idea, which would have provided inadequate coverage to a small population of Texans. The block grant mania didn’t really rev up as a conservative fantasy rebuttal to the ACA until late 2010/2011. Other than that, your summation is spot on, this is little more than political theater.