Texas Health Insurance Quotes

Greg Abbott was a great track star in high school, having never lost a race, but in 1984 a tree fell on him while he was jogging through the wealthy enclave of Houston’s River Oaks, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He had just graduated from law school and had no health insurance. Fortunately, he won a $9 million judgment from the homeowner whose tree had fallen, and from the tree company that had inspected the tree and failed to recommend its removal. Later, as a member of the Texas Supreme Court, and then as attorney general, Abbott supported measures that capped pain-and-suffering damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000.

In 2013, Texas passed Florida when it improved its spending on human services, moving up to 49th and leaving Florida — you guessed it — dead last in the nation. Notable also is Florida's failure to provide health insurance to large numbers of children and families eligible for federally funded Medicaid/CHIP programs.

I write these words in May of 2011, the week after a huge outbreak of tornadoes killed hundreds across the American South; it was the second recent wave of twisters of unprecedented size and intensity. In Texas, a drought worse than the Dust Bowl has set huge parts of the state ablaze. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is moving explosives into place to blow up a levee along the Mississippi River, swollen by the the third “100-year-flood” in the last twenty years—though as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration noted at the end of 2010, “the term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” That’s because 2010 was the warmest year recorded, a year when 19 nations set new all-time high temperature records. The Arctic melted apace; Russia suffered a heat wave so epic that the Kremlin stopped all grain exports to the rest of the world; and nations from Australia to Pakistan suffered flooding so astonishing that by year’s end the world’s biggest insurance company, Munich Re, issued this statement: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.” And that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that on April 6, the U.S. House of Representatives was presented with the following resolution: “Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental Protection Agency that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” The final vote on the resolution? 184 in favor, 240 against. When some future Gibbon limns the decline and fall of our particular civilization, this may be one of the moments he cites.

also open to people with health insurance. In Texas, the state with the nation’s largest uninsured population, and perhaps the worst state in the union to live in if you’re poor and chronically ill, scores of people come here.

For years I didn’t realize this because so many others had more. We were surrounded by extreme affluence, which tricks you into thinking you’re in the middle of the pack. I mean, sure, we have twenty-four hundred square feet for only five humans to live in, but our kids have never been on an airplane, so how rich could we be? We haven’t traveled to Italy, my kids are in public schools, and we don’t even own a time-share. (Roll eyes here.) But it gets fuzzy once you spend time with people below your rung. I started seeing my stuff with fresh eyes, realizing we had everything. I mean everything. We’ve never missed a meal or even skimped on one. We have a beautiful home in a great neighborhood. Our kids are in a Texas exemplary school. We drive two cars under warranty. We’ve never gone a day without health insurance. Our closets are overflowing. We throw away food we didn’t eat, clothes we barely wore, trash that will never disintegrate, stuff that fell out of fashion.

Hospitals cannot continue to hemorrhage. For the country as a whole, medical insurance premiums include a surcharge that pays for treating the uninsured. However, if the proportion of uninsured indigent patients exceeds a certain figure, a hospital has no choice but to close. In California alone, the heavy cost of free medicine for foreigners forced no fewer than 60 hospitals to shut down between 1993 and 2003; many others were on the verge of collapse. From 1994 to 2004, the number of hospital emergency rooms in the country as a whole dropped by more than 12 percent. In May 2010, Miami’s health care system was so strapped, it was considering closing two of its five public hospitals. This would mean laying off 4,487 employees and the loss of 581 acute-care beds. Experts explained that treating uninsured patients had stretched the system to the breaking point. Houston is a good example of a city whose hospitals are barely making ends meet. In the nation as a whole, about 15 percent of the population has no medical insurance, but Texas, with its large population of Hispanics, has the highest percentage at 24 percent. In Houston, the figure is 30 percent. The safety net cannot accommodate so many people who cannot pay. “Does this mean rationing?” asks Kenenth Mattox, chief of staff at Ben Taub General Hospital. “You bet it does.” There is such a crush at Houston’s emergency rooms that ambulances often wait for one or two hours before they can even unload patients. The record wait is six hours. Twenty percent of the time, hospitals end up sending patients to other hospitals, and some have died after being diverted. Politicians and businessmen pull strings so friends can cut in line. Americans who fall sick in Mexico do not get free treatment. The State Department warns that Mexican doctors routinely refuse to treat foreign patients unless paid in advance, and that they often charge Americans for services not rendered.

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