06.14.07

Texas Continues At Or Near The Bottom In Health Care Coverage

Posted in Health Care, Had Enough Yet?, Around The State at 12:36 pm by wcnews

From the DMN today, Studies say Texas lags in health care access.

To many people, Texas has a strong reputation for quality health care.

Retirees who move to the state cite good hospitals as a key attraction. Dallas’ Baylor University Medical Center and UT Southwestern Medical Center are renowned for churning out top-notch doctors. The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston attracts patients from around the world.

But among the 50 states, Texas’ health care system ranges from average to poor, according to two reports released this week.

Industry experts say the low rankings are explained largely by the widening gap between Texans who have health insurance and those who don’t.

In other words if you have health insurance Texas is great, if you don’t'…..not so much. Not to oversimplify but, duh!

The study was done by The Commonwealth Fund. They bill themselves as, “..a private foundation that aims to promote a high performing health care system..” The full study is here, Aiming Higher. The Texas specific information is here.

Texas
Overall rank: 49

Overall and Dimension Ranking
• Overall : 49
• Access: 51
• Quality: 46
• Avoidable Hospital Use & Costs: 48
• Equity: 49
• Healthy Lives: 24

Only Oklahoma and Mississippi are lower (51 in the study because DC was included). Shameful. This is definitely an area where Republicans in Texas have failed and only the Democrats should make sure every Texan know this. If it wasn’t for all the negative attention that CHIP and the Accenture deal brought to the health care issue in Texas as of late, this would have been worse and that’s hard to imagine.

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