Obamacare would add huge unfunded mandate to Texas Medicade

Houston Chronicle:

Republican Sen. John Cornyn on Tuesday stepped squarely into the partisan melee over health care reform, warning Texans and the Senate Finance Committee that a proposed compromise by Senate Democrats' would saddle the Lone Star State with billions of dollars in added costs.

The San Antonio lawyer, leading GOP efforts to regain control of the Senate in 2010, drew upon a study he requested from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to contend that the Democrats' proposal would add 2.5 million more poor people to Texas' Medicaid rolls and boost state taxpayers' projected Medicaid costs by $20.4 billion over 10 years.

Statistics compiled by the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent think tank on health-related issues, show 4.1 million people of all ages in Texas enrolled in Medicaid in 2006. The state and federal government spent $20.6 billion to cover them.

The proposed compromise by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the 23-member Senate panel, “taxes too much and grows government too much” to become law over Republicans' objections, Cornyn said.

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Cornyn said the Democrats' proposal would add as much as 10 percent to the cost of coverage bought in the private market. The measure also would potentially expose 91 percent of Texans with individual private policies to fines for inadequate coverage, he said.

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This confirms one of my earlier arguments about the added cost of private insurance because the plan contemplated by Democrats does not compensate health care providers for the full cost of services so they make it up by tapping insured patients.