By Nathan Bernier, KUT News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-877916.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Texas Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn are likely spend some of their holiday break hearing from constituents about the health care reform package passed by the Senate Christmas Eve. In Austin, KUT's Nathan Bernier looks at what health care overhaul might mean for Texas.
The next legislative step is the conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate health bills. We don't know what's going to come out of it. But we do know what's going in into it. Anne Dunkleberg is with the Center for Public Policy Priorities - a progressive think tank. She says the House bill does a better job of capping expenses for low- and moderate-income Texans.
Dunkleberg: "One of the ways that we illustrate this is that a family of three in Texas earning a little over 27,000 dollars a year - so that's three people, 27,000 dollars a year - under the house bill, the most that they would pay for premiums and out of pocket costs would be 7 percent of their income, but under the Senate bill they could spend up to 19 percent of their income."
Dunkleberg says that matters to Texas because most of the uninsured people in this state earn below 250 percent of federal poverty level. She says the House health care bill would insure more Texans more quickly - in part through a greater expansion of Medicaid. But the idea of expanding Medicaid irritates some people. Arlene Wohlgemuth is with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market think tank. She is concerned that even the Senate's more moderate expansion of Medicaid would cost Texas 2-billion dollars over ten years -- once the federal government stopped paying for the expansion in 2017.
Wohlgemuth: "The Senate bill is going to increase our taxes. We're going to have to cover the 2-billion. And that's just for Medicaid. It doesn't even cover the cost of setting up an insurance exchange that the bill requires. This is absolutely the worst economic time to be trying something like this."
Republicans say they will take their objections to the bills home with them over the winter recess, and attempt to drum up voter anger towards Democrats.