Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is fuming over Obamacare’s fee on health insurers that unfairly affects Medicaid patients. The fee, which costs Texas about $120 million a year, according to Paxton, forces Texas to help pay for the health care law, or else face cuts to Medicaid.
“This threat to cut Medicaid funding to Texans unless the state continues to pay hundreds of millions in taxes to Washington amounts to the very ‘gun to the head’ the Supreme Court warned about in earlier rulings on Obamacare,” Paxton said in a statement Thursday.
He is suing Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over the “unconstitutional tax.”
“This represents yet another huge overstep of authority for this [federal] administration, which once again has demonstrated their willingness to circumvent the Constitution in order to achieve their policy goals.”
Paxton is joined by the Kansas and Louisiana attorneys general in his challenge to Obamacare. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt is demanding a refund of $32.8 million for his state’s coerced contributions to the Affordable Care Act.
This is the fourth time Paxton has sued the Obama administration.