If an entire state could be crazy as a box of frogs, it would be Arizona. If a whole state could be crazy and brag about it, it would be Texas.
Governor Rick Perry, who surely makes every Texas heart swell with pride, has announced that the Lone Star State will refuse to expand Medicaid to cover an additional 1.5 to 2.3 million Texans with little income and no health insurance. Right now, about one in four, approximately 6.3 million -- including 1.2 million children -- are without healthcare coverage. In fact, we lead the country in uninsured citizens. Of course, we also lead in the percentage of women with no health insurance. And to maintain our ranking, we tried earlier this year to block federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the only source of cancer screening and other health and reproductive services for about 40,000 low income women in South Texas because we just don't like Planned Parenthood.
Governor Perry says Texas can't afford the expanded Medicaid costs, even though the federal government would pay 100 percent of it for three years and 90 percent thereafter, and even though the state's chief fiscal officer, the Comptroller of Public Accounts, has estimated that continuing to allow uninsured people to forgo any kind of preventive care and wait until medical problems become acute to seek treatment at hospital emergency rooms ultimately costs taxpayers about $10 billion a year.
It's certainly not that the governor is against government spending. His recent foray into presidential politics cost Texas taxpayers more than $3.7 million in travel and overtime for his Texas Department of Public Safety security detail.
More important than the money, it's a matter of principle. That's why he's also refused to allow Texas to comply with provisions of the Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress and deemed constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, to establish an insurance exchange: a marketplace where people can choose among private insurance policies or opt for a government administered Medicare-type program.
Both Medicaid expansion and an insurance exchange "represent brazen intrusions into the sovereignty of our state," Perry said. "I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our Constitution and our founding principles of limited government."
He was evidently unaware that 223 years before, a young nation that had tried for a decade to operate with strong state governments and a weak central government under Articles of Confederation, finally concluded that it just didn't work. So they drafted and adopted a Constitution, which, despite Republican talking points, is not just a treatise on limited government.
Perry maintains that Texas doesn't need the federal government trying to tell us how to run our healthcare system, despite the fact that in 2011, we ranked 50th in 155 key indicators of healthcare quality, such as cancer rates, elderly care, early childhood care, infant mortality, disease prevention and preventable deaths. If Texas wasn't one of the United States, we'd be a top candidate for U.S. foreign aid. Philanthropic rock stars would be staging Live Aid for Laredo concerts.
Having a buffoon for a governor is a serious problem for Texas, but we're not alone, and that's the larger problem. Rick Perry joins at least six other Republican governors who are refusing to expand healthcare coverage for low income citizens or to comply with other provisions of federal law, including the "leaders" of Florida and Louisiana. You remember Florida and Louisiana? One couldn't get enough federal dollars after the BP oil spill, and the other was nearly washed away by Hurricane Katrina and only kept afloat by billions in federal rescue and rebuilding dollars.
We are in a time when the partisan divide is so deeply etched that many of our elected leaders put any pretense of working together to find solutions for urgent problems far behind ideology and political orthodoxy; a time when allowing people to continue suffering -- especially those least able to fight for themselves -- is an acceptable cost to win or maintain power.
Tragically, even the best healthcare system in the world has no cure for this.
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