(Image is from healthplansandmore.com.)Texas is ruled by right-wing Republicans, and that is the main reason that Texas continues to lead the nation in both the number and percentage of people without any kind of health insurance -- and it continues to get worse. Those Republicans continue to treat healthcare as a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it -- not a right of humans.
The following is by Stacy Fernandez in The Texas Tribune:
The rate of Texans without health insurance rose for the second year in a row, making it once again the most uninsured state in the nation, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2018, 17.7% of Texas residents — about 5 million people — had no health coverage, up from 17.3% in 2017. Both years, Texas had almost double the number of uninsured people compared with the national average of 8.7% in 2017 and 8.9% in 2018. It was one of only nine states to record an increase in the uninsured rate. Texas is one of 14 states that have not expanded Medicaid, a joint state-federal program that provides health care to low-income individuals, since the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act — better known as Obamacare. President Donald Trump made the repeal and replacement of Obamacare a major part of his 2016 campaign, but the U.S. Senate narrowly rejected a bill in 2017 that would have repealed parts of the ACA. . . . Expanding Medicaid would have filled coverage gaps for an estimated 1.1 million low-income Texans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Between 2017 and 2018, fewer Texans got their insurance through Medicaid — the number dropped 0.7%, to 17.9%.
