No Credit to Perry for Texas Economy, But Lots of Blame for Texas Health Care in NYT
The New York Times may not give Texas Gov. Rick Perry credit for his state’s booming economy, but it will certainly attack him for his state’s supposedly awful record on providing health care. Emily Ramshaw reported “Few Bright Spots in Perry’s Health Care Record” for Friday’s edition.
Ramshaw, a reporter for the Texas Tribune, a left-leaning nonprofit news organization based in Austin that has a content partnership with the Times, played the same sour notes on Perry and Texas health-care statistics as the paper’s regular reporters.
At campaign stops and in the three Republican presidential debates he has participated in so far, Gov. Rick Perry has made a sport out of bashing the 2006 state health insurance plan of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. He has not missed a chance to yoke “Romneycare” to “Obamacare,” the federal health care reform that Republicans largely revile.
But while Mr. Perry condemns both efforts to make carrying health insurance mandatory, Texas faces a staggering crisis in health coverage: the state leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents, has the third-lowest percentage of people covered by their employers and spends less per capita than all but one other state on Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program for the disabled and poor children.
Ramshaw’s story was slightly less slanted than the headline, allowing Perry’s aides room to challenge the governor’s liberal opponents.
His aides point to legislation that Mr. Perry signed to let insurers offer lower-cost, smaller-scale health plans to consumers, to let single-employee businesses join health care cooperatives and to help employers pay for their workers’ health care without negative tax consequences.
During his tenure, Texas created a health insurance pool to sell policies to people with uninsurable medical conditions, Mr. Perry’s office said, and received a multimillion-dollar federal grant to develop tools to increase private insurance coverage.
Texas enters the health insurance game at a disadvantage. Mr. Perry likes to remind voters that the state is responsible for more than 40 percent of new jobs created in America since June 2009. But many of those jobs are in the service industry, in agriculture, construction and the small-business sector, which either do not provide insurance or do not pay their workers enough to buy it. Texas Medicaid is austere -- many low-income Texans who might qualify for public insurance in other states do not qualify in Texas
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This is how you know the NYT
Submitted by bkeyser on Sat, 10/01/2011 - 5:19pm.
is not for the betterment of the country. Under Obama, things have not improved -on any front. Oh, you can argue that had the stimulus not been passed, things would have been worse. (Though that's like saying had I gotten up at 6am this morning instead of 6:30, I wouldn't have accidently stepped on the dog this afternoon. It's possible -I guess- but there's no way to prove it.) You can also argue that had government stayed out of the mess for the most part, things may have gotten worse initially, but we'd have recovered by now and by this point, things would be much better.
But what we all can see is that unemployment is substanitally worse now than when BHO took office. The debt has increased drastically, with no plan to curb it. The jobs plan he finally put forth more than a week after calling on Congress to "pass it now" has been submitted to the House and Senate with zero co-sponsors. Scandal after scandal is now surfacing; probably after months or years of them being buried or ignored by the press. And yet the NYT is ademently defending this guy and championing his re-election. Why?
It can't simply be ideology. Anyone with half a brain can see the country is worse off and heading in the wrong direction under BHO. If Bush went out in shame -as so many on the left like to posit- then Obama should be run out with a bucket over hs head riding backwards on a mule. (H/T South Park) So it must mean they're accepting of the direction Obama has put us on. They can't possibly be relying on some hope he'll correct things; he's not corrected anything. His track record is nothing but dismal failure; except in the area of expanding Bush's policies on the War on Terror; something the NYT generally railed about. So, it simply has to be that the NYT wants America to continue our downgrade. They must have bought into the Friedman position of subservience to China. Or maybe they simply wish for America to lose the "c" and add a "k"; to complete the transformation first attempted 50 years ago by the Soviets -to create communism from within by infiltrating weak minds and convincing them that Statism is the only way forward. They must love this Occupy New York/Boston/DC/LA crap.
Logic suggests the NYT is anti-American.
Emily Ramshaw thinks she is Rosa Luxemburg.
Submitted by drsamherman on Sat, 10/01/2011 - 9:55pm.
But she is more like Jeane Dixon - a second rate "psychic" and always claiming (after the fact) that she had predicted it. She is a standing joke in Texas--the kind that usually begins with a mother admonishing a child, "Don't [fill in the blank] or you'll end up like Emily Ramshaw!"