We Both Go Down Together

Published on July 9^th of 2012 the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured criticized the topic of Rick Perry’s predictable call on health care in The Dallas Morning News. Obviously upset with the decision of our Governor to turn down the Medicaid expansion program this editorial article explains why Rick Perry shouldn’t have opted out of the program and how because of him we are missing an opportunity to expand Medicaid.

In the article they use the statistic “One out of every four residents of Texas has no health insurance.” But there is so many more factors to that statement. There are an estimated 25,145,561 people that populate Texas and an astonishing ~44% of that population are illegal aliens*, that’s nearly half!

We give a percentage of our already hard to come by insurance to people that aren’t even legal residents. Before the people of Texas start talking about how to fix the already lacking insurance coverage, we need to defeat the war on illegal immigration entering our state and eventually give actual citizens what they deserve. Not to mention with so many illegals taking over Texas jobs, Texans miss out on the opportunity to get a substantial job that may provide some sort of insurance.

Rick Perry is portrayed telling the great state of Texas to basically suck it up and in many ways you could blame him for his decisions to turn down the Medicaid expansion program. But who we should really blame are the registered voters that elected this man. Perry, an obvious Republican clearly cares very little about social reforms.

It’s pretty clear that he did something right to become governor and until we put a Democrat into that position we won’t see a change in any such social reforms. The intended audiences of this article are people that believe Perry shouldn’t have chosen to exclude citizens of their rights to have health insurance as well as Democrats that believe in reform of social programs.

I feel like the credibility of their argument is almost lost, because yes, Texans who want health coverage should be able to receive such benefits but there are so many other hurdles we need to get over before providing something that not everyone deserves (wow, I know, harsh…) or even wants.

My conclusion to this article is this: There are so many people who don’t have insurance out of lack of necessity, and because they don’t make it a priority they wait until it’s to late. Before we start blaming a single person we need to look at other aspects of this unfortunate situation.

*The statics of ~44% of Texas’ population being illegal immigrants is based off of dividing 100 by the total number of the Texas population (25,145,561) and then multiplying the outcome by a report by the Pew Hispanic Center’s percentage of undocumented immigrants in 2010 (11.2 million). Both statistics are based off of Texas' population in 2010.