Copyright 2000 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
The Houston Chronicle
April 14, 2000, Friday 3 STAR EDITION
SECTION: A; Pg. 43
LENGTH:
681 words
HEADLINE: Bush 'clueless' on health care,
just look at Texas
BYLINE: BOB HERBERT; Herbert is a
columnist for The New York Times.
BODY:
LAST week
he was an environmentalist. Now he's a health-care reformer. Who knows what
rewriting of reality is yet to come?
George W. Bush's first speech on
health care was delivered in Cleveland on Tuesday.
"We will promote
individual choice," he said. "We will rely on private insurance. But make no
mistake: In my administration, low-income Americans will have access to
high-quality health care."
That very morning The New York Times was out
with a Page One article by Adam Clymer that began as follows:
"Texas has
had one of the nation's worst public health records for decades. More than a
quarter of its residents have no health insurance. The Mexican border is a
hotbed of contagion. The state ranks near the top in the nation in rates of
AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis and teen-age pregnancy, and near the bottom in
immunizations, mammograms and access to physicians.
"But since George W.
Bush became governor in 1995, he has not made health a priority, his aides
acknowledge. He has never made a speech on the subject, his press office says.
His administration opposed a patients' bill of rights in 1995
before grudgingly accepting one in 1997, and fought unsuccessfully to limit
access to the new federal Children's Health Insurance Program in 1999."
The rest of Clymer's article was just as devastating. Bush may be
lip-synching the language of reform as he seeks to impress independent and
Democratic voters, but the reality in Texas is tragic. According to a report by
the state comptroller's office in 1998, "Health conditions on the Texas-Mexico
border are among the worst in the United States, so distressful that reports on
health conditions suggest a remote country in need of medical missionaries, not
a part of Texas."
Texas has been notoriously backward when it comes to
health care. But if George W. Bush was at all concerned about that, he didn't
let on. His choice for state health commissioner, William R. Archer III, would
likely make a real health care reformer ill. Example: Texas may be at the bottom
of the national heap in terms of health insurance coverage, but that's no big
deal to Archer.
Clymer wrote: "Almost alone among health experts in
Texas, Archer minimizes the importance of the low rate of health insurance, a
protection that two-fifths of the state's poor children lack. In an interview,
he said he thought that while 'eventually we have to insure everybody,' he
believed the uninsured were still getting care."
Well, sure. Some do.
They get sick and show up at hospital emergency rooms. Of course, some wait too
long.
Archer's easy acceptance of this wretched method of delivering
health care mirrors that of Bush. Referring to a hypothetical uninsured mother
of two, the governor said in a television interview last month: "She's got
accessibility, in my state at least, to health care in emergency rooms and
clinics."
He admitted that wasn't the "most affordable" or "the smartest
way to run a health system." But it was, you know, access.
Answering a
question about health care on a Fox News program in January, the governor said:
"You go to emergency rooms in my state. . . . They're full of people. They're
full of people. There's access."
Bush said affordable insurance was his
health-care goal, his "mission," but he saw the crowded emergency rooms in Texas
as proof that his constituents already had access to health care.
This
is not good. The governor appears to be clueless about health care, both unaware
and unconcerned.
In February, during a campaign appearance in Florida,
Bush was questioned by a woman who wanted to know what he might do about the
fact that her health insurance did not fully cover the needs of her son, who had
a chronic, life-threatening illness.
According to The New York Times'
Frank Bruni, Bush seemed "stumped" by the query. "He sang the praises of medical
savings accounts," wrote Bruni, "then acknowledged that it was too late for the
woman to start one and that he really had no specific remedy for her."
Bush told the woman: "I'm sorry. I wish I could wave a wand."
TYPE: Editorial Opinion
LOAD-DATE: April 15, 2000 
