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Posts filed under category: Health Care
Women More Likely to Be Uninsured
The uninsured problem in Texas is worse than you thought, at least according to a new study.
There are nearly three million low-income women in Texas, and 52 percent of them lack health insurance.
That’s the stunning finding of a recent study of women’s health insurance coverage by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the California-based nonprofit that specializes in health care policy studies.The report includes a state-by-state breakdown, and the numbers for Texas aren’t pretty.
It’s no secret that many Texans lack health insurance. For years, the state has boasted the highest uninsured rate in the nation. But the Kaiser figures are especially alarming.Women in Texas are more likely than men to be uninsured. Twenty-eight percent of women in Texas lack health insurance. That's the highest rate in the country and far above the national average of 18 percent. (About a quarter of all Texans are uninsured. If 28 percent of women are uninsured, it means the rate for men must be far lower.)
For poor women, the prospects are even worse. The 52 percent of low-income Texas women without health coverage is the highest rate in the country. No other state even tops 45 percent.The Kaiser has similar reports going back 10 years. While skimming the numbers, I noticed that while the percentage of Texas women without insurance has always been high, the numbers spiked by about 5 percent after 2003. That was the year the Legislature passed a bare-bones budget that cut hundreds of thousands of Texans off Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Hard to know if that's the cause, but it's an interested correlation.
The bottom line is this: Uninsured women lead less health lives. They postpone getting treatment and are much less likely to received preventive care such as mammograms and Pap tests.
National health care reform might change all this. Under the plans that Congress is debating, nearly all low-income women would be covered by Medicaid. Many other women would receive government subsidies to buy insurance.In Texas, that would help millions of poor women.
Posted under: Health CareManslaughter at a State School
More sad evidence this week that reforming the troubled Texas state school system -- the 13 large institutions for the mentally disabled -- will be a long, difficult job.
A former employee at the Lubbock State School was indicted on Tuesday on manslaughter charges. A direct care worker named Doneil Smith allegedly killed a 45 year old resident. Smith allegedly suffocated the resident to death.
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal has more details:
The medical examiner's office ruled Nicholson died of suffocation during a struggle.
The autopsy report cited information from investigative reports which stated that Nicholson was on a mattress with someone lying over his upper torso when he died.
Lilly Nicholson told the A-J in August that several state school employees caused his death while trying to dress him.
She said her son suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and refused to dress while his clothes were being washed.
The Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS), the state agency that oversees state schools, has fired Smith and five other employees at the Lubbock facility, according to the paper.
As you may know, state schools have endured well-documented problems in recent years. (You can read our story on the facilities here.)
The Legislature passed several state school reform bills last session, including a 12-percent funding increase for the chronically underfunded institutions. (You can read our coverage of the reforms here.)
I should note that lawmakers did change the name of these facilities. They're not longer state schools. They're "state supported living centers."
But lawmakers ignore one major issue: They didn't increase the salaries for state school workers, who are among the lowest paid state employees.
Caring for the mentally disabled is a demanding, difficult job, and only certainl individuals are cut out for it.
But the $8-an-hour starting salary is why the Lubbock State School -- now called the Lubbock State Supported Living Center -- wound up with someone like Doneil Smith caring for a vulnerable patient with mental retardation.
It's worth noting that this incident happened in June, before the recently passed reforms took full effect.
But the incident shows it will take a lot more than a name change to fix these facilities, and without the pay increase, it's not clear that conditions will improve.
Posted under: Health CareHeath Care Reform Would Benefit Texas
Must-read column today by Michael Schnurman in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He details how and why national health care reform would benefit Texas.
For one, when it comes to health insurance, the free market isn't all that free. In many states, there are too few insurance companies to spark true competition for customers.
But here's the catch: Even in states with lots of competition (states like Texas), prices have still gone up. Schnurman writes:
Lots of competition means lots of choice and lots of benefits for consumers — at least that’s the theory.
Except that in health insurance, the results have often been higher prices and more cherry-picking of the best customers.
"We have lots of choices, but they aren’t affordable choices," said Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin research group that supports reform. "Having a lot of competitors isn’t sufficient in itself."Free market principles just don't graft well on to certain policy areas -- such as education. Same goes for health care. It's proven nearly impossible to create a pure health insurance market. With health care, more competition doesn't necessarily reduce prices.
Schnurman also piggybacks on the excellent research by CPPP that shows how much national health care reform would benefit Texas, especially if there's a public option:
Unfortunately, a lot of people in Texas don’t get insurance from large employers or from employers at all. Just under 49 percent of Texans have employer-sponsored insurance, compared with an average of 56 percent for the nation (and 88.5 percent in Hawaii).
It’s part of this group that stands to benefit from a public option. The government plan would be added to a health insurance exchange that includes private carriers and offers several tiers of coverage. The public option would be offered to individuals, as well as employees of small companies whose plans were too expensive or limited in coverage....Like it or not, reform is coming, and Texas stands to be one of the big winners. For people looking to the health insurance exchange — and there will be a lot of them in Texas — the public option could make it even better.
Posted under: Health CarePublic Option Lives
The Washington Post is reporting that Harry Reid plans to include a public option in the Senate's version of the health care reform bill:
Under pressure from liberals in his caucus, Reid has carefully canvassed Senate Democrats in search of 60 votes needed to bring health-care reform to the floor with a public option provision included. So far, he has not locked down commitments from every Democrat, Senate sources said.
Some of the public-option approaches on the table include an "opt out" clause that would allow states to decide not to participate in a government plan; an "opt in" provision for states that many Democratic moderates prefer; and a "trigger" that would create a government plan if private insurers do not offer policies at affordable prices.Reid reportedly plans to make an announcement about the public option this afternoon.
It's still not clear that a public option can garner the 60 votes needed to clear a filibuster in the Senate.
But the prospect of a government-run plan seems more likely today than it did even last week.
It's amazing how some Democrats suddenly decided to fight for a public option after seeing this poll.
Posted under: Health Care« Older PostsHow the Health Care System Screws Us
If you want to understand just how nonsensical -- and myopic -- our health care system is, I encourage you to listen to last week's episode of the radio program, This American Life.
You can listen to the show here.
It was co-produced with NPR News, and explores the health care debate in-depth. (TAL and NPR co-produced a similar program last year about the financial crisis -- for my money still the most enlightening piece of journalism produced about the Wall Street meltdown -- and, yes, that pun was intended.)
Their look at health care is also engrossing. Particularly fascinating is Chana Joffe-Walt's narrative of how drug companies use "coupons" to trick patients into buying the most expensive, name-brand drugs (even when generics are available).
The drug companies make a killing on that by passing the added costs on to the health insurance company, which ultimately pays for the drug. Now, if you're thinking that the health insurance company isn't going to swallow that extra cost, you'd be right. The insurance company passes the cost for the more expensive drug back to all of us through higher premiums. It's a circular scam.
If you're interested in the health care debate, the show is a must-listen.
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