| Wonder what government would look like under a Rick Perry administration? Just look at government in Texas. |
| [Texas] 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.
In the 10 years Mr. Perry has been governor, his critics say there have been few effective initiatives out of his office to increase either public or private health coverage significantly in Texas, where today an estimated 6.2 million people — one-quarter of the state’s population — are uninsured, including 1.3 million children. Just 50 percent of Texans get insurance through their employers, 10 percentage points below the national average. Source: "Few Bright Spots in Perry’s Health Care Record" By EMILY RAMSHAW - NY Times - September 29, 2011 After Mr. Perry’s decade in office, Texas now claims the highest uninsured rate, at 26 percent, as well as other distinctions like the lowest rate of prenatal care. Mr. Perry and the Republican-controlled Legislature have cut Medicaid benefits and provider reimbursement rates and made enrollment more onerous. “The governor believes that expanding government-sponsored insurance is not the answer,” said a spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier. “Nor is requiring people to purchase it. He looks to free-market solutions.” Rather than expanding public insurance, Mr. Perry sought to improve access by revamping the medical liability system. In 2003, he backed a successful measure that limited noneconomic damages against physicians and hospitals to a total of $750,000. But three law professors — Bernard Black of Northwestern University, David A. Hyman of the University of Illinois and Charles Silver of the University of Texas ...found no evidence that it slowed the growth of health care costs. Source: "G.O.P. Candidates’ Stances on Health Care Mask Their Records as Governors" By KEVIN SACK - NY Times - September 3, 2011 [N]early 10 percent of hourly Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average -- and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State. What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is ''Well, duh.'' The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs -- which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice -- involves a fallacy of composition: every state can't lure jobs away from every other state. In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs -- because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem. So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don't believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas's crippling drought. Source: "The Texas Unmiracle" By PAUL KRUGMAN - NY Times - August 15, 2011 A scorecard compiled by the Commonwealth Fund in 2009 showed that ...among 50 states and the District of Columbia in the percentage of children and the percentage of adults below Medicare age who had health insurance. Texas was last in both categories. Based on 38 indicators covering such factors as access to treatment and quality of care, ...Texas 46th. Mr. Perry’s personal-responsibility approach has left a quarter of the state’s population uninsured. His supporters give Mr. Perry huge credit for limiting medical malpractice awards. That has reduced liability awards and allowed some hospitals to save money. But it has not increased the state’s supply of doctors any faster than it was already increasing and has not reduced Medicare spending compared with trends in other states that did not cap malpractice awards. As for the free market being the answer, Texas has one of the lowest percentages of people covered by employer-based insurance, and its employers dump a lot of the cost on the workers. Source: "Lessons on Health Care" - NY Times - September 4, 2011 |
No one has submitted a comment on this statement yet.
Be the first and submit your feedback below.
Submit your comment below |