Decade of ‘PerryCare’ Has Made Texas an Unhealthy Place to Live
If the Tea Party has its way next year, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will become president of the United States. What we can expect from a Perry administration is a lavish inaugural, a medieval approach to science and religion, trickle-down economics and an approach to health care that places even basic medical care beyond the reach of most people, according to a report on NPR.
Only 48 percent of the Texans have private health insurance, and more than a quarter of the state’s population has no insurance at all — more than any other state. Perry has been governor for a decade, so the state of health care in Texas is a result of — let’s call it PerryCare.
Over the past eight years, citing budget constraints, Gov. Rick Perry and the Republican-controlled legislature have dropped hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and working-class Texans from the rolls of government-sponsored insurance like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Nearly 6.5 million Texans are now uninsured even though the majority of them have full-time jobs.
Premiums in Texas’ unregulated health insurance industry have soared by 105 percent over the past 10 years, according to the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. Texas employers have responded by raising employee deductibles, often dramatically, or by dropping their coverage entirely.
