Rep. Kolkhorst: “Texas has never jumped into any federal program”
Rep. Lois Kolkhorst is riding point for the red team that is trying to keep Texas from doing the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
It’s a delicate role, which is perhaps why the Brenham Republican tried to wrap herself in Texas tradition in a final interview I did with her Friday morning for a story in Sunday’s paper about how the clash over Medicaid expansion is coming down to two competing philosophies — hers and Houston Democratic Rep. Garnet Coleman’s.
“Slow approaches are always better,” Kolkhorst said. “Texas has never jumped into any federal program. We have declined to take the Race to the Top money [for] our school districts, we made that decision. We didn’t jump into CHIP first and we didn’t jump into Medicaid back in the ’60s first. We’ve always taken the slow approach and it seemingly has led to a place where we’re the state that leads the economy right now in the nation.”
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More problemmatic, though, is Kolkhorst’s suggestion that Texas dragged its feet in participating in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, created by Congress in a 1997 budget-balancing law, and Medicaid. Medicaid was created in 1965 when a Texan president, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed into law a bill creating both the state-federal program for the poor by that name, and the federally administered Medicare program for seniors.
More at http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2013/04/kolkhorst-tx-has-never-jumped-into-any-federal-program.html/ .
[font color=green]Except what Kolkhorst says isn't true. In the regular sequence of state government decision-making, both programs were authorized by the Legislature at its next regular session. With biennial sessions, Texas often takes a couple of years to react to new federal laws. That’s what happened with Medicaid, which was passed by the Lege in the ’67 session and commenced in September of that year. And it happened with CHIP, which was passed in the ’99 session and signed by Bush.
As a resident of Brenham, I'm so disappointed that I didn't have any other choices to vote for in the 2012 election. 
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