Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said Wednesday that she opposed the congressional Republican effort to defund Obamacare, saying that it would be a blow to the state’s budget.
“The bottom line is we need that money in our economy to save rural hospitals and jobs in the rural areas,” Brewer said, according to the Arizona Daily Star. “It’s all about jobs and getting back federal dollars that our taxpayers have paid to the federal government, to bring them home.”
Arizona is one of several Republican-led states to accept the law’s Medicaid expansion. The federal government covers 100 percent of the costs of the expansion for the first three years and never less than 90 percent after that. That funding is unaffected by the shutdown, but it would presumably be lost if the GOP actually succeeded in its push to defund the entire law.
If the state didn’t receive that federal money, Brewer said, “we will be faced with a calamity.”
