Children Go Without Insurance In Texas

After seeing the mean policies of the Texas Republican leadership, this shouldn't have surprised me -- but it did. I already knew that one out of every four children in Texas lives in poverty (significantly larger than the one in five national average) and state leaders didn't seem to care, because they slashed the social and educational programs that would help these kids the last time the legislature was in session. But I thought surely they would supply these kids with a minimum amount of health insurance.

I was wrong. Using both state and national government data, the non-partisan Center for Public Policy priorities has determined that there are at least 1,200,000 children in this state that have no health insurance at all. That puts these children at serious risk, since 90% of children with insurance are considered healthy while only 58% of children without insurance are healthy.

This disgraceful situation exists in a state that Republicans nationwide say is a model for other states to emulate. But they say that because Texas has very low taxes for the rich and corporations (while the workers and the poor pay a much higher percentage of their income in taxes) -- and the rich are the only people Republicans care about.

There is no excuse for 1.2 million Texas children to be without health insurance. But the governor and legislature think it is more important to play politics on the health issue than to actually provide help to these children (or adults, where the uninsured rate is 27%). They have turned down federal funds tied to health care and severely underfunded Medicaid -- just to please their teabagger base.

What will happen to these kids? The only health care available to them will be in hospital emergency rooms, and is not set up to provide that kind of care. It just makes those emergency rooms more crowded (and more expensive since these patients will likely be unable to pay). And too many kids with serious diseases will find it too late to be helped by the time they are sick enough for an emergency room.

The Republicans claim they cannot afford to cover all these children with health care, but the truth is that it must be paid for somewhere. They have just made sure it will be paid for the most inefficient and expensive way (by raising local taxes for public hospitals, and by raising the cost of all medical procedures in both public and private hospitals -- which raises the cost of insurance for everyone).

This is just one more example of why Republicans should be voted out of power.