Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said on Tuesday that he’d be enrolling for health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace. It’s an ironic political twist, considering he also promised to repeal “every word” of the law when he announced his presidential candidacy on Monday.

Cruz has been on a path to repeal the law, which is also known as Obamacare, since 2013, when he delivered a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor in an effort to defund the law. But now that he’s running for president in 2016, his wife has taken an unpaid leave of absence from Goldman Sachs in Houston, where she’s a managing director. With no health insurance coverage through his wife, he’s left with few options, if any at all.

“We’ll be getting new health insurance and we’ll presumably do it through my job with the Senate, and so we’ll be on the federal exchange with millions of others on the federal exchange,” Cruz told CNN's Dana Bash in an interview.

Obamacare was designed to fill gaps such as these, in which families might find themselves without health insurance. But as a government employee, he’s eligible for a federally subsidized contribution of up to 75 percent of his premium. When he was asked whether he’d accept the government contribution, he said he’d “follow the text of the law.” Unsure of what that meant, Bash asked again.

“I strongly oppose the exemption that President Obama illegally put in place for member of Congress because (Senate Minority Leader) Harry Reid and Senate Democrats didn’t want to be under the same rules as the American people. I believe we should follow the text of the law.”

That plan by Senate Democrats, as The Washington Post reports, was never really an issue in the first place. It was only an effort to get the same subsidies government employees had under their previous health program, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, onto Obamacare. Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Cruz said after the interview that he wouldn’t accept the contribution, following suit with a few other lawmakers.