Yesterday I wondered aloud whether hanging onto every possible dollar is the only motive behind the GOP's line in the sand concerning tax increases for millionaires and billionaires. I suggested --- no original thought, I admit --- that forcing cutbacks of entitlements, such as Medicare and Social Security, is a second, significant motive. This morning, I wonder could it be the primary motive?
The presidential candidacy of Texas Governor Rick Perry has put the media spotlight on the Lone Star State. Perry likes to tout his job-creation record. He's right to a degree. Texas's unemployment rate, while not laudable, is lower than the national average. This is not a Rick Perry achievement so much as an historic fact. Thirty years ago, when I taught law at the University of Texas in Austin, people were moving to Texas in search of work. This even included academics. A colleague of mine, Jim Bell, had given up tenure in a Michigan university in hope of greater job security, even as an untenured faculty member, at UT.
What Perry doesn't advertise is the fact that Texas has the highest percentage population lacking health insurance in the nation: 25% ! Only 48 % have private health insurance !!
Where do the folks with no coverage go for medical care? Emergency rooms, of course. And, according to NPR, with regard to uninsured females, to some 70 women's health clinics across the state. Now the Republican-dominated Texas legislature and the Governor have cut the funding to these clinics by two-thirds. Why? Simple: among the services the clinics provide --- in addition to breast cancer screening and other crucial preventive testing --- are contraceptives and referrals to abortion clinics. That's enough to get their funding pipeline strangled.
Suggesting that tax saving is not the main motive, most of the money lost by the free clinics will be redirected to so-called Crisis Pregnancy Centers. The state already reportedly spends $1.3 billion on teen pregnancies, making it the national leader in this category, too. In San Antonio alone the number of unplanned kids born to teenage moms will fill 175 kindergarten classrooms annually.
There are 165 Crisis Pregnancy Centers scattered across the state. They try to persuade their clientele to put their babies up for adoption, but only about two percent are willing to do so.
Adoption seems to be the evangelical solution to the utter absence of family planning that the movement espouses.
With 312 million people, the US remains reasonably livable in a world of seven billion, which increasingly is not. That fact alone calls into question policies that, directly or indirectly, promote population growth, particularly among the 15% of Americans living below the poverty line.
For my wife and me, Obamacare means our daughter, who's trying to make it as a freelance writer and novelist, can remain covered by my wife's health insurance. I don't much care for the idea of my "little girl" having to have recourse to an emergency room if she gets sick... or having to buy a bare-bones HMO policy, because that's all she can afford. But that's the Distopia Rick Perry and the Republican right want for America. Before they will require their rich constituents to pitch in their fair share of taxes, they'll continue to drive Uncle Sam to the brink of the default cliff... partly to keep their money right where it is, but as much or more to force the Texas vision of health care onto the nation as a whole.
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