You can always tell who or what's going to get screwed by Republicans. It's the person or group they most fondly embrace with their rhetoric. Right now families and children are getting it right up the old wazoo.
Paul Krugman uses Texas as the extreme example, but the gleeful neglect reaches well beyond Texas.
...When advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear. ...
...While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.
But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong.
It’s not a pretty picture; compassion aside, you have to wonder — and many business people in Texas do — how the state can prosper in the long run with a future work force blighted by childhood poverty, poor health and lack of education.
And things, Krugman assures us, "are about to get much worse."
The next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.”
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This morning in Texas, in a very rural part of the Texas panhandle, Krugman's nightmare scenario appears in harsh, high plains daylight.
Cuts proposed to state Medicaid funding could mean reduced access to medical care throughout rural areas in Texas, according to doctors and rural hospital advocates.
Dr. Mike Henderson of Childress told the Austin American-Statesman that cuts could close the obstetrical unit at Childress Regional Medical Center, the only hospital within 100 miles of Childress that delivers babies.
Republican Rep. John Zerwas, an anesthesiologist from suburban Houston, understands the dilemma and said the state's Medicaid rates are "woefully inadequate."
Henderson's son, John Henderson, is the Childress hospital's chief executive. He said 70 percent of the infants delivered there are Medicaid cases, and the hospital loses about $1,000 on each. Year to year, the hospital loses from $200,000 to $300,000 just on Medicaid births, he said.
"Anything that reduces payments to rural hospitals because of their narrow margins could jeopardize their ability to stay open," said Don McBeath of the Texas Organization for Rural and Community Hospitals. ...Houston Chronicle
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