Brownback Vows No Obamacare for Kansans
Online Producer
A day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said he had no plans to implement provisions of the health care law.
“This is now in the hands of the American public. Mitt Romney has said on Day One he’ll grant a global waiver from the implementation of Obamacare, so now it’s up to the American public to decide, and I’m going to see what’s going to happen in the fall election before we move forward,” he said on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”
Approximately 13 percent of Kansans, or 351,000 people, did not have health insurance, according to a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation report.
“This thing is a budget buster of gargantuan proportions, at state and federal levels,” Brownback said of the federal health care law, adding that he was adopting a wait-and-see approach when it came to setting up a state health insurance exchange.
“You could get started on it now, but this is now an issue for the American public,” he said.
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“I think the prudent course right now is to say, ‘Let’s wait, let’s see if Mitt Romney is elected, or if Obama is re-elected.’ If Romney’s elected, the global waiver, we don’t have to move forward at that time.”
Brownback did not address what might change for uninsured Kansans in the near future, but issued a prediction for the upcoming presidential election.
“It looks like Obamacare is going to be the dominant issue in the fall,” he said. “I think it’ll even penetrate to the local level.”
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