Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who joined a multistate lawsuit challenging the new federal health care law this week, is taking heat from Democrats who say he backed a plan that required non-custodial parents to provide medical coverage for their children.

The health-care overhaul enacted this week requires most people to buy insurance or pay a fine. Texas and a dozen other states are challenging the new law in part on that requirement, which they argue is unconstitutional.

Abbott contends there's no hypocrisy on his part in trying to boost compliance with child-support health insurance laws. His office says the program he supported is quite different than the health care overhaul bill that President Barack Obama signed this week.

But Abbott's election opponent, Barbara Ann Radnofsky, the Democratic National Committee and other Democrats disagree.

"It's really a beautiful example of hypocrisy," Radnofsky said. "The attorney general was happily acceding to the federal requirements of mandating the noncustodial parent, usually the dad, to pay for health insurance or making a medical payment. ... The ironic thing is he was promoting very broad health care mandates."

At the center of the dispute is a new state law that created ChildLink, an alternative insurance program for parents of the 1.3 million children in the state's child support collection system, which is managed by the attorney general's office.

Federal and state laws since 1995 have required those parents to provide "medical support" for their children, Abbott spokesman Jerry Strickland said, and Abbott is simply carrying out existing law. Parents could provide insurance through their employer, through private coverage or through cash payments. ChildLink takes the place of those cash payments with a low-cost health insurance policy, Abbott has said.

"ChildLink does not establish a new mandate," Strickland said.

Asked whether Abbott was endorsing or facilitating an existing law that required certain parents to buy health coverage, Strickland said: "That's the law. It's no new mandate. And it's constitutional to do so."

But Abbott appeared before a conservative group in January 2008 and proposed making private sector health insurance available to uninsured children in Texas' child support system.

In a newspaper opinion piece he wrote in June 2009, as the Texas Legislature finished its session, he urged Republican Gov. Rick Perry to sign the ChildLink law. Abbott said it "does not impose new financial obligations on parents. Rather, it simply shifts their duty from an obligation to pay cash medical support to an obligation to pay health insurance premiums."

Perry signed the measure.

In the lawsuit filed by Texas and 12 others states in Florida on Tuesday challenging the new federal health care law, Abbott claims among other things that the federal law violates the Constitution by requiring citizens to buy health insurance and violates the 10th Amendment protection of states' rights.

Strickland said those legal claims don't apply to the child support health insurance law. For instance, he said, Texas can require drivers to purchase car insurance, but the federal government cannot.

Forbes.com