Texas Needs Healthcare Reform

Recently, we learned that Texas was number one in pregnant teenagers. Then we found out that Texas was number one in DWI deaths. As if that wasn't bad enough, now we find out that Texas is still number one in the percentage of people without any health insurance.

According to figures released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, 24% of the people in Texas do not have any health insurance -- that's one out of every four Texans! But as embarrassing as that should be for our state leadership, it gets even worse.

In the entire United States, there are 45.1 million people without health insurance. 5.5 million of those people are in Texas. That means out of the entire 50 states, Texas has over 12% of the people without health insurance. All Texans should be apalled at these numbers.

It's time for our state and our nation to do something about this tragedy. There are some who say we can't afford to address this problem, but the fact is that we already spend more money per capita than any other industrialized nation for healthcare -- we just don't receive very much for our spending.

Other industrialized nations spend less, and yet still are able to provide healthcare for all of their citizens. There is no reason why we can't do the same. But first, we must get the insurance companies out of the way. We will never have the best healthcare system as long as insurance executives are in charge of it.

There are some things that government does better than the free market, and health insurance is one of those things. We must take the profit motive out of health insurance, while we encourage it among healthcare providers. We can have a single-payer government-run system that covers everyone, allows us to choose our own doctors and hospitals, and puts doctors back in charge of making healthcare decisions.

All we need are politicians with courage and foresight, who haven't been bought by the insurance companies.