Looking Beyond HealthCare.gov, Obama Urges States to Expand Medicaid - East Idaho News
News

Looking Beyond HealthCare.gov, Obama Urges States to Expand Medicaid

  Published at

020713 PresidentObama?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1383802251922Official White House Photo by Pete Souza(DALLAS) — President Obama Wednesday night urged Texas state leaders to expand Medicaid coverage, as he sought to focus attention away from the botched Obamacare rollout.

Speaking to volunteers in Dallas that are promoting the Affordable Care Act and helping people enroll, the president said his administration is working “overtime” to fix the glitch-ridden HealthCare.gov site.

“The website is already better than it was at the beginning of October, and by the end of this month, we anticipate that it is going to be working the way it is supposed to,” he said.

Shifting his focus to Republicans, the president urged the state’s governor, Rick Perry, to allow for the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

“One of the things that sometimes gets me a little frustrated, although I understand it because I’m in politics, is folks who are complaining about how the website is not working, and why isn’t Obama fixing this, and all these people are uninsured, and yet they’re leaving a million people right now without health insurance that they could immediately fix.  There’s not a lot of logic to that,” he said.

Expanding Medicaid coverage was originally part of the Affordable Care Act, but, because of the Supreme Court ruling last year, the decision was ultimately left up to the states.

“Here in just the Dallas area, 133,000 people who don’t currently have health insurance would immediately get health insurance without even having to go through the website if the state of Texas decided to do it. There’s over $500 million just for this county that would come in to help families get health insurance — has nothing to do with the website — if the state of Texas made this decision,” Obama explained.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

SUBMIT A CORRECTION