While growing up in Texas, I learned to always respect a man who stands up for his principles. Rick Perry and the other statewide elected officials in my home state are making it pretty difficult to follow that lesson.

With Senators Coryn and Cruz and Representatives Barton and Burgess at his side, the Governor of Texas ripped into President Obama’s Medicaid expansion, calling it a “fool’s errand” and an attempt to hold Texas “hostage.” He went on to assert that Republican governors who participated in this essential Obamacare provision will “come to rue the day because Medicaid will take a larger and larger share of their state budgets.”

While some Republicans will certainly claim that Perry’s heart is in the right place, no one in their right mind could argue that his head is. Either Perry is using his Medicaid posture to gain conservative support for another White House bid, or he’s having another one of those “senior moments” that cost him so dearly during last year’s Republican debates. Either way, here are the top five reasons why both Republicans and Democrats can join in declaring Rick Perry’s claims Texas-sized whoppers.

5. The federal government pays for 100 percent of the Medicaid expansion for the first three years, and will pay for at least 90 percent in the following years. That is way better than the deal the states currently have with the federal government, where Washington covers 57 percent of current Medicaid spending and leaves the states to cover the other 43 percent of the tab. The Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan entity) calculates that the federal government will cover 93 percent of the cost of expansion over the first nine years. This is the equivalent of the federal government taking the states out to fancy restaurant, buying them a nice meal, a bottle of wine and picking up the check after dinner, except for some of the sales tax. There doesn’t seem to be much to complain about here.

4. The Department of Health and Human Services is giving states an extraordinary amount of flexibility in how they implement the changes to Medicaid. Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe and Secretary Sebelius have reached a tentative agreement to use Medicaid expansion funds to buy private insurance coverage for low-income residents of Arkansas. Other Republian governors have similar deals in the works. Perry released an op-ed last week calling Medicaid “a broken system that doesn’t work.” The Obama administration’s solution with Arkansas would seem to resolve Perry’s concern.

3. Accepting the Medicaid expansion will add 2.8 percent to what states currently spend on Medicaid, according to the CBO. I think that number speaks for itself.

2. Texas will lose money if it chooses not to expand Medicaid. And not only will it lose money, it will lose a lot of money, money that protects the state’s already razor-thin social safety net. Because the authors of the Affordable Care Act understandably didn’t anticipate states turning down essentially free money (or the Supreme Court allowing them to), they created a Medicaid funding formula that shifted a lot of the funding received by hospitals that service the poor into the funds for Medicaid expansion. That basically means that hospitals that help the most needy will lose a lot of money if Perry opts not to expand Medicaid.

1. Perry and his allies have no plan to increase the number of Texans with health insurance. I get it, they don’t like Medicaid. They don’t like Obama. And they don’t like federal bureaucrats telling them how to run their state. But for the love of God, one in four Texans lacks health insurance. That is the highest rate in the nation. Yet, Perry, Dewhurst, Cruz, Cornyn and the rest of their Republican buddies have failed to produce any solution to the crisis that has gripped the state. If Perry spent less time gallivanting in California and more time devising policy, his state wouldn’t be in such a dire predicament.

It's time for Governor Perry to stop grandstanding and either work with the Obama administration on a Medicaid expansion plan that can be made palatable to the state legislature, or find some alternate proposal to fix the problem. His failure to do both is hurting too many people in the lone-star state.

 

Reach Columnist Christian Patterson here; follow him here.