Misguided Cruz missile: Let’s recap how bad healthcare is in Texas

Sen. Ted Cruz has finished his not-technically-a-fillibuster 21-hour speech in the Senate. Cruz covered a lot of ground in his speech, but the Senate is voting on the House bill anyway.

What did he accomplish? Not much. Did he do it because Texas has a better option than Obamacare? No.

Let’s look at the state of health in Texas.

Last week the Census Bureau confirmed that the state STILL has the highest rate of uninsured people in the country: 26.4% in 2012. That includes 1 million kids with no insurance.

The Commonwealth Fund ranks the Texas healthcare system the third worst in the nation. Only Arizona, Nevada and Mississippi are worse. The Fund’s new report, “Healthcare in Two Americas,” has an exhaustive collection of data that covers many measures of care. You can see how each state ranks in four areas: child health system, state health system, local area systems and low-income services. Texas is in the bottom quartile for all but one of those analyses. It is the third quartile for low-income population.

Women now find it harder to get preventive healthcare after Texas successfully defunded Planned Parenthood. According to the Austin Chronicle,

Under the old Women’s Health Program, for every $1 invested by Texas, the feds kicked in $9, saving the state millions each of the five years it was operational. Moreover, the WHP was designed to help reduce the costs associated with Medicaid births in Texas. (More than half of all births in Texas are paid for by Medicaid, costing the state some $2.9 billion in 2009 alone.)

Planned Parenthood was the single largest provider under the original WHP, serving more than 40% of the roughly 130,000 women enrolled in a single month. But as part of the coordinated efforts since 2011 (begun years earlier) to deny Texas women the ability to seek care from PP, conservative Texas lawmakers rewrote rules for the WHP in order to exclude PP.

And, of course, there will be no Medicaid expansion in Texas. In 2012, Gov. Rick Perry said he would not expand Medicaid and in May of this year, the state legislature agreed. Voting against a Medicaid expansion meant that Texas hospitals would lose about $7 billion, on top of the $700 million a year reduction in Medicaid payments from state budget shortfalls and sequestration cuts. And, 1.5 million poor people in Texas still won’t have healthcare.

This August Perry changed his mind about federal help with healthcare for his citizens. He now wants $100 million for the Community First Choice program that improves the quality of services available to the disabled and elderly in their homes or communities.

What are chronic conditions like in Texas?
Diabetes is a growing problem. Check out this cool visualization of diabetes rates from The Texas Tribune (emphasis mine):

The number of Texas adults with diabetes is set to quadruple over the next three decades, from roughly 2 million to nearly 8 million, according to new projections released today by the Texas Health Institute, the State Demographer’s Office and Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas. Those hardest hit will be Latinos in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, demographers suggest, where obesity is particularly prevalent and health insurance coverage is extremely low.

Texas ranks 19th for obesity with 29.9% of residents with a BMI of 30+. This is better than most of its neighbors in the Southwest, but also catching up quick.

Based on data from 2002-2006, Texas ranks 10th for depression and has the 14th highest suicide rate in the country.

Aren’t there any healthcare jobs in Texas?
Aren’t there some doctors or nurses or pharmacists or physical therapists who could talk to Cruz? Yes, there are lots of healthcare jobs in Texas at the state’s nine medical schools, three dental schools, two optometry schools and two Biosafety Level 4 laboratories. The Texas Medical Center in Houston has 47 member institutions. Texas Medical Center performs the most heart transplants in the world, and of course The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center is in Houston. The American Heart Association and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center are in Dallas.

What about entrepreneurs and startups?

Lots of people are trying to change healthcare in Texas. Health Wildcatters has a great inaugural class that includes startups addressing physical therapy, neuromodulation, non-invasive blood glucose monitoring and several other big healthcare problems.

Pristine.io is based in Texas. Aunt Bertha is too.

These people who understand the need to do something different in healthcare need to elect Senators who get that too.