This article is slightly dated, read the stats, they are jaw dropping!
9/7/11 04:06 AM
Almost 17% of Americans Have No Health Care, and Texas Is Even Worse
By CanyonRat
Texas has the highest rate of medically uninsured in the nation. Perry has been governor there for 11 years.
A nation's shame, if the "leaders" of this country were able to feel such a thing. 16.8% of the nation has no health insurance coverage in 2011. In 2008, the last year of the G.W. Bush the Lesser administration, 14.8% of the nation didn't have health care coverage.
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Northeast- the states that have the best coverage:
Massachusetts: 5.3% of its residents are uncovered by health insurance. Even though this is the best rate of coverage in the nation, Republican Presidential candidate and former Gov. Mitt Romney has disavowed his creation now he's running again, referring to parts of it as "unconstitutional." Yeah, that'll win him votes in his old state. Mitt takes it back. Give it up.
Vermont: 9.2% have no health care coverage in Sen. Bernie Sander's state. Sanders, an Independent, is for universal coverage.
Connecticut: 10.3% without health insurance in the state represented by Sen. Joe Lieberman, who opposed the public option and early Medicare buy- in, and whose wife was on the board of many pharmaceutical companies. Lieberman is not running for re election.
Pennsylvania: 10.8% without health insurance
New Jersey: 11.4% of them have no health insurance, altho they have Gov Christie telling them to get the h*ll off the beach when hurricanes show up, and then to get the h*ll back on the beach when they're gone.
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The Hall of Shame - Some states with lower insurance coverage than the national average:
North Carolina: 20.8% have no health care coverage.
Arkansas: 21% have no health care coverage- and Sen Blanche "There will be no public option" Lincoln got the boot in 2010.
Louisiana: 21.4% have no insurance for health care in a state suffering from the aftereffects of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill and Corexit dispersant spraying by the U.S. government.
California: 21.9% of us have no health care coverage. We are worse than .... North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
Oklahoma: beats CA with 22.5% uninsured.
Florida: 22.6% uninsured for health care needs, in a state full of retirees on Medicare, which means the younger adults are getting hit proportionally harder.
Alaska: 23.5% out of the insured pool, in spite of Denali care.
Mississippi: 24.5% of people have no health care coverage, in this poor state.
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And the winner, for the state with the fewest number of residents with health care coverage is....
TEXAS, home of the current Republican front runner in the Presidential campaign, Gov. Rick Perry. Texas has 27.2% of its residents uncovered for health care. That's 10.4 percentage points higher than the pathetic national average. That's 3 times the number of uninsured in Vermont and over 5 times as many as in Massachusetts. One person out of every 3.6 people you see in Texas have no freaking health care, except the Emergency Room.
The unemployment rate in Texas is a whopping 8.4%, and Rick Perry is citing that as a measure of "success." Perry has been governor of Texas since 2000, the year former governor Bush resigned after he won the election for President. So this is the result of long standing Bush - Texan economic policy. He can't say he inherited it.
35.6 is the number result from adding the Texas uninsured and unemployed rates together. Let's call it the "New Millennium Misery Index." And that about matches Perry's 36% polling number for the Republican candidates, per Politico.
Compare it to 9.1 ue and 16.8 ui to get a National Millennium Misery Index of 25.9. The old "misery index" was unemployment added to inflation, but hey, if economists can just make number combinations up, so can I.
Perry says on his minimalist campaign website page on these topics if you create jobs you create insurance coverage. Where? The next country we're outsourcing jobs to ? He hasn't noticed his state's 1 in every 3.6 has no health care ?
The rest of us would beg to differ about the so - called Texas economic miracle. Look into the future United States and tell us what you see in Texas now, high unemployment, burned with drought and with no health care, and tell us that is the desired outcome.
Look at how deliberately the current crop in DC are AVOIDING this topic, both parties. Instead, both imply they'd like make the disaster bigger, to raise the retirement age. This would have the effect of throwing more older people into the jaws of the failure of the high priced free market insurance, and denying them Medicare coverage longer. Medicare, a non profit, has the lowest overhead, so this is the most illogical, and a deliberate retreat from getting more Americans covered. It is time to ask why some of us accept that our elected think their only obligation is to run for the offices that they have no intent of actually working in. It is time to demand better from those who have no imaginations. And when Republicans run on BRINGING BACK the pre existing condition exclusion clause for profit driven insurance, it is time to question our sanity that they get 36% in the polls.
http://my.auburnjournal.com/detail/187179.html
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