The GOP in the 
Lone Star State have no intention of easily complying with the healthcare reforms.
Even though the Affordable Care Act is now safe from appeal, the Republicans in Texas have made it quite clear that the new laws for health insurance will not budge on the decisions that they made prior to the election.
Some of the biggest issues in question involve the online marketplace and the expansion of Medicaid.
According to the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, “Nothing changes from our perspective.” He doesn’t feel that the results of the election, which include the victory of President Obama and the increasing strength of the Democrats’ hold on the U.S. Senate, have any bearing on the decisions that the state has already made regarding the future of its health insurance and healthcare system.
The Republican governor has stated from the beginning that he is against the health insurance reforms.
In fact, he called an expansion to the Medicaid health insurance program an “untenable” budget buster. He underlined his existing opposition to broadening the program in order to cover a larger number of Texans in the lowest income brackets, despite the fact that the federal government would be picking up the majority of the tab for doing so.
A spokesperson for the governor stated last week that Texas also would not be volunteering to establish and operate its own health insurance exchange program. The federal healthcare reform law says that a state can choose not to roll out its own online marketplace, but that if it does make that choice, the federal government would take over and create one on the state’s behalf.
According to Catherine Frazier, the press secretary for Perry, the leaders in Texas have made it clear that it will not be responding by November 16, the deadline that has been established for the states to choose whether or not they will be creating their own health insurance exchanges, or whether the federal officials will be doing so.
Frazier said that “Texas will not be a subcontractor to Obamacare.” She did acknowledge that officials from the federal government would still “dictate how it’s operated” and would be the ones who would enforce “rules that haven’t even been determined yet.”
