Who's for TexasCare?

The favorite topics of the contemporary fringe right are national health care reform (bad) and states' rights (good). So Gov. Rick Perry has decided to mix them together and suggest that the way forward is to let states handle health care.

That could depend on which states he's looking at.

At a meeting today with the Lubbock Area Association of Health Underwriters, Perry proclaimed, "Cutting into a state's ability to apply local fixes to local problems stifles the sort of innovative solutions that states are best suited to develop." The solutions currently being considered in Congress, he added, "will cost taxpayers billions of dollars without significantly improving access to or treatment in our health care system."

Perry argues that the Medicaid reforms being considered could add $30 billion to $60 billion to the state budget (which could be a real incentive for him to actually get serious about a balanced budget i.e. creating a sustainable tax base).

Now some might say that, after he spent much of the last lege session arm-twisting to get CHIP reform killed, that he lacks credibility on the issue of effective state-level health provision: But he has a point. After all, Texas has done such a bang-up job on kid's health issues. Oh, hang on, infant mortality has actually risen in Texas over the last five years.

In his press release about the meeting, Perry rails against the "federal takeover of some current state insurance functions such as rates and coverage exclusions." Hey, don't want the health insurance premiums paid by Texans to go up. Especially since they already rose 107% between 2000 and 2007

Oh, well, at least Perry's administration has done a fantastic job of ensuring that every Texan has affordable health care. Nope, nope, Texas actually has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation.

At least Texas has lots of doctors, right? So that whole free-market choice thing works, right? Oh, no, that's not it: Although the ratio of doctors has risen from 201 per 100,000 residents in 2000 to 213 in 2005, that's still way behind the national average. In fact, Texas has dropped in the national rankings from 37th to 41st in that time. According to Texans Care for Children, 63 of Texas' 254 counties have no acute care hospital.