People Without Health Insurance In Texas

Texas leads nation in numbers without health insurance

AUSTIN — Texas leads the nation in the percentage of people without health insurance, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures released Tuesday.

Last year, 6.1 million people, one of every four Texans, were uninsured. Those figures are much higher than the national average of 16.2 percent. Out of 304 million Americans, 47.9 million had no medical coverage. The Census Bureau will release a county-by-county breakdown for Texas later this month.

“With so many Texans without health insurance, Texas needs to move more aggressively to successfully implement national health care reform, which will give millions more Texans a way to get quality affordable health care,” said Frances Deviney, senior research associate at the Austin-based Center for Public Priorities, a think tank advocating for needy Texans.

State Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, attributed the high percentage of uninsured Texans and the state’s high poverty rate to the massive spending cuts the Legislature has made in recent sessions, especially this year when lawmakers tackled a $27 billion shortfall.

But statistics and government numbers don’t always tell the whole story, said Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo.

“In hearings we’ve held and in studies we’ve seen, what you see is that our Anglo and African-American populations are insured at a higher rate,” said Smithee, chairman of the House Insurance Committee.

The legislator added many in the growing Hispanic population opt out of insurance coverage, even when eligible for it, for cultural or financial reasons.

“I don’t want to sound like I am blaming Hispanics, but this is a reality we have in Texas,” he said.

Rep. Raul Torres, R-Corpus Christi, agreed with his colleague, saying he sees this phenomenon where he lives.

“A lot of people, especially the young, have the attitude that they don’t need insurance because they don’t get sick,” said Torres, a certified public accountant. “These are the same people who don’t save for retirement either … the same people who live paycheck to paycheck.

No Credit to Perry for Texas Economy, But Lots of Blame for Texas ...

The New York Times may not give Texas Gov. Rick Perry credit for his state’s booming economy , but it will certainly attack him for his state’s supposedly awful record on providing health care. Emily Ramshaw reported “ Few Bright Spots in Perry’s Health Care Record ” for Friday’s edition.

Ramshaw, a reporter for the Texas Tribune, a left-leaning nonprofit news organization based in Austin that has a content partnership with the Times, played the same sour notes on Perry and Texas health-care statistics as the paper’s regular reporters.

At campaign stops and in the three Republican presidential debates he has participated in so far, Gov. Rick Perry has made a sport out of bashing the 2006 state health insurance plan of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. He has not missed a chance to yoke “Romneycare” to “Obamacare,” the federal health care reform that Republicans largely revile.

But while Mr. Perry condemns both efforts to make carrying health insurance mandatory, Texas faces a staggering crisis in health coverage: the state leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents, has the third-lowest percentage of people covered by their employers and spends less per capita than all but one other state on Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program for the disabled and poor children.

Ramshaw’s story was slightly less slanted than the headline, allowing Perry’s aides room to challenge the governor’s liberal opponents.

His aides point to legislation that Mr. Perry signed to let insurers offer lower-cost, smaller-scale health plans to consumers, to let single-employee businesses join health care cooperatives and to help employers pay for their workers’ health care without negative tax consequences.

During his tenure, Texas created a health insurance pool to sell policies to people with uninsurable medical conditions, Mr. Perry’s office said, and received a multimillion-dollar federal grant to develop tools to increase private insurance coverage.

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