Rick Perry of Texas, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and many other governors and state legislators across the country are proving to be rather obstreperous. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s controversial decision on Obamacare, they’ve looked past the convoluted ruling on the individual mandate and zeroed in on the clearer 7–2 decision that Washington may not compel the states to go along with the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid. These Republican state officials have already decided not to comply with the Medicaid provisions; other state leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, are considering doing the same.
The Obama administration and its supporters on the left are apoplectic about this. They are demanding, loudly and furiously, that state officials not be so rude as to look the gift horse of Obamacare in the mouth. Why in the world, they ask, would governors and legislators pass up a deal to insure millions of Americans at little or no cost to state governments? Why aren’t governors and legislators salivating at the prospect of drawing billions of federal tax dollars into their local economies through new Medicaid spending? “They would be committing fiscal malpractice if they left all this money on the table,” Ron Pollack, head of the nonprofit group Families USA and an Obamacare supporter, told the Washington Post a few days after the Supreme Court decision.
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