This will be a short diary because I'm fairly busy today (college football and all), but after browsing the Times website, I came across an article that has left me literally speechless. Texas Lawmakers Consider Medicaid Withdrawal. I've said it before and I'll say it again, and I don't give a damn whose feelings I hurt - the right-wing is a cancer on this nation and its people. Texas is at the forefront of this vile, disgusting movement that doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone but rich, white people. Texas can seriously go fuck every desolate square mile of itself.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, estimates Texas could save $60 billion from 2013 to 2019 by opting out of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, dropping coverage for acute care but continuing to finance long-term care services. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which has 3.6 million children, people with disabilities and impoverished Texans enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, will release its own study on the effect of ending the state’s participation in the federal match program at some point between now and January.
3.6 million out of Texas' total population of around 25 million is around 15 percent. FIFTEEN PERCENT of their population and these worthless thugs don't have any second thoughts about tossing these poor people into health care limbo, or worse. And the Texas GOP "moderates" position?
State Representative John M. Zerwas, Republican of Simonton, an anesthesiologist who wrote the bill authorizing the health commission’s Medicaid study, said early indications were that dropping out of the program would have a tremendous financial ripple effect. Mr. Zerwas said that he was not ready to discount the idea, but that he worried about who would carry the burden of care without Medicaid’s "financial mechanism."
"Because of the substantial amount of matching money that comes from the federal government," Mr. Zerwas said, "there’s an economic impact that comes from that. If we start to look at what that impact is, we have to consider whether it’s feasible to not participate."
Not one hint of concern for the actual people who will be royally fucked by this. It's all about money; people are mere statistics, widgets of a sort in Texas Republicans' addled minds. The next 'graf there's a wingnut legislator who said it would have to make fiscal sense without jeopardizing care. Are you kidding me? Without jeopardizing care? What do you think this entire fucking idea is, per se? Jesus, these are sick, sick people.
The money quote from this article is from the beginning and tells you everything you need to know about Texas, and more than that, the entire right-wing movement:
And the party’s advisers on health care policy say it is being discussed more seriously than ever, though they admit it may be as much a huge in-your-face to Washington as anything else.
That is truly unbelievable. Literally dooming God knows how many innocent people whose only crime was not being able to afford health insurance to poor health care, or worse, simply to cheese off them Washington libruls, and that Obamba to boot. Unreal. Again, just a microcosm of the modern right, from this to rust belt governors denying HSR, simply, as far as I can tell, to piss off liberals. And older, white, blue collar men turned out in droves for them. What is wrong with this country? That's a complex question, deserving of a complex answer. But a large part of what is wrong with our country is the fascist tendencies of our second largest state. Texas needs to just be a whole other country.