Posted on 07/14/2002 2:32:00 AM PDT by sarcasm
Belying the state's anti-tax, individualistic image, a majority of Texans favor a publicly funded national health-care plan in which all Americans would receive their insurance from a single government source, according to a University of Houston poll.
In results poll takers attributed to the state's growing Hispanic population, 52 percent of Texans favor such a plan. Only 40 percent of people nationally favor such a plan.
"I wouldn't have expected that outcome in a conservative state known for a fend-for-yourself, don't-rely-on-government attitude," said Richard Murray, director of UH's Center for Public Policy, who coordinated the survey. "I think it's rooted in an increasing knowledge of just how severe insurance problems are in Texas, particularly among Hispanics, who are less likely to have insurance."
Hispanics, 64 percent of whom supported a national health-care plan, reported the greatest amount of difficulties with health-care issues. The problems included paying bills, getting services, securing health insurance, getting prescriptions filled and general dissatisfaction with the quality of health-care service.
The survey found that 57 percent of the state's Hispanic population has health insurance, compared with 88 percent of Anglos and 77 percent of blacks. Overall, Texas' health-care insurance rate is 77 percent, lagging behind the national average of 82 percent.
Murray said he asked about a national health-care plan, even though the idea's defeat during the Clinton administration seemed to doom it for the foreseeable future, because it was included in a recent national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, National Public Radio and Harvard University. That survey, which found discontent with the state of the U.S. health-care system, supplied the national numbers.
State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, vice-chairman of the Texas House Committee on Public Health, said he, too, was surprised that 52 percent of polled respondents favored a national health-care plan and expressed hope that it meant that "in their guts, Texans understand the problems of the uninsured."
Coleman said he hoped the results would send a message to Gov. Rick Perry about where Texans stand and embolden the 2003 Texas Legislature to expand health coverage to more people. In 2001, Perry vetoed a bill to expand Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Perry could not be reached for comment Saturday.
Murray said he isn't aware of any previous poll asking Texans what they think of a national health-care plan financed by taxpayers. In his poll, 43 percent of respondents opposed such a plan, and 5 percent gave no answer. Forty-nine percent of Anglos and 54 percent of blacks favored such a plan.
In 2000, a national study found that 59 percent of immigrant families living in Houston had no health insurance, by far the highest rate of any U.S. city.
The UH poll found a majority of Texans think government politics has a negative effect on health care, and more said health care's quality has gotten worse over the past two years than said it stayed the same or improved. Holding down the cost of care and providing coverage for people without insurance were the most popular answers in response to what should be the 2003 Legislature's health-care priorities.
Strong majorities said they favored requiring businesses to offer private insurance for their employees; income tax deductions, tax credits or financial assistance to help uninsured Americans purchase private insurance; expanding programs such as Medicaid and CHIP; and expanding neighborhood clinics.
Mary Ann Bobinski, director of the UH Law Center's Health Law and Policy Institute, said the problems of the uninsured will intensify as the Hispanic population continues to grow. She noted that studies show that the uninsured are more likely to go without health care, suffer from untreated illnesses and ultimately impose significant costs on the health-care safety net.
Murray said the survey, the UH Center for Public Policy's first, will be done every year to track data. Conducted June 20-29, it surveyed 1,007 Texas adults in a random telephone sample. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Yeah - and chances are they don't speak English either. Been there and done that!!
Where do we go to surrender?
Making Enron's $600 million restated financial statements look like a mistake in a child's allowance, the U.S. Treasury has admitted an accounting error and a resulting loss of $17.3 billion.
The admission appeared in the 2001 Financial Report of the United States Government issued earlier this spring and accompanied by the statement by the General Accounting Office (GAO) that once again, for the fifth consecutive year, the GAO is "unable to express an opinion on the consolidated financial statements because of certain material weaknesses in internal control and accounting and reporting issues."
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stated in the report, "I believe that the American people deserve the highest standards of accountability and professionalism from their Government and I will not rest until we achieve them."
The report indicates that three factors contributed to the error: inaccurate bookkeeping by government agencies, errors in reporting contracts among government agencies, and timing problems associated with reporting costs and revenues.
For further information: http://www.fms.treas.gov/cfs/01frusg/01frusg.pdf
I'm not surrendering jack squat. Although, I'm sure most of the knuckleheads that think the government will solve all their problems will be surrendering at the ballot boxes.
To keep my sanity, I now go to a pharmacy which doesn't accept Medicaid.
I do the same thing. My grocery store in Lakewood (Dallas old money) has a pharmacy and I get my prescriptions filled there while I do my shopping. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
That's what has happened. We see it here all the time, illegals and other visitors from Mexico get completely free health care, they don't have to put a dime into the system, meanwhile premiums and co-pays and deductibles and taxes for the citizens are just going up and up.
I'm sure I live in a different part of Texas than you do but it does represent the majority opinion of the ones here. Texas will soon have a state income tax to support all the government programs they're adding. The school system and health care are becoming completely socialist in Texas.
Sure hope that does not come to pass. I believe there are a few constitutional hurdles that must be jumped first. But I've got Wyoming on the radar screen just in case.
If you have not read "Mobocracy" by Matt Robinson, do yourself a favor and do so.
He pretty much blows away any rationale for paying attention to or relying upon polls, especially of this kind.
In the present case, I suspect you'll find they are polling people who have essentially NO IDEA of any of the ramifications or consequences to their answers. They simply respond to the pollster's questions, which without knowing exactly what they were, and how they were framed, makes them worthless for analysis.
Robinson showed how you can do two polls at the same time on exactly the same issue, with the same sample-size, and get DIAMETRICALLY opposite results.
Again, this is just bullsh*t, another lame attempt by the press at "journalism," which they no longer know how to do.
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