Free Services

The costs of Medicaid are skyrocketing at levels that should be alarming to every Texan over the age of 18.  It is estimated to be expanding over $27 billion in Texas alone, according to Thomas Suehs, executive commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. According to him, Medicaid accounts for almost one third of Texas’ state spending, equaling $862 dollars per Texas resident. If you were dining at a restaurant and the waiter brings you the tab for the nearest ten tables around you, would you be ok with that? If you do not want to be caught picking up the tab for their medical bills, It is time to take action.  With rising costs and changes in population these figures will average $3500 per Texas Resident by the year 2023 according to the John C. Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

On a daily basis I hear families calling to ask if one of the doctors that I work for accepts Medicaid under one of the many faces and aliases that it has.  “Do you accept Medicaid Traditional, Medicaid Superior, Medicaid Star, Medicaid Amerigroup, Medicaid Sendero, Chip, Chip Star, Chip Star plus?”... The list goes on and on.   Or the alternative call is one of a family asking for free healthcare stating they do not qualify for Medicaid but they were told if they just ask to get free healthcare, they could get it. It’s awkward to have to tell someone no, you can’t have free services simply by asking for them. You wouldn’t go to an apartment complex and ask to live there without paying rent, so why are we asking physicians to provide services without charging them for it?  Fortunately, most physicians do not go to twelve years of schooling in order to provide their services free of charge. If that were the case it would take months before you would be able to get an appointment.

Real change needs to be made to put a stop to the almost free care the government is requiring doctors to provide. First, providing free healthcare should not take up one third of any state’s budget. Second, who is going to provide healthcare for all these uninsured people? It’s a known fact that Medicaid imbursement rates are even lower what an insurance company will pay. All of the physicians that I work for in the Round Rock area have closed their practice to new adult Medicaid patients. There’s only so many patients that you can see before those kinds of deficits in revenue affect your business.

The question is how does reform and change start? How can we impact this at the average citizen level. Voting, our only voice. We as citizens need to become more involved and actually deny the chances of increasing state budgets for Medicaid and other free health programs.  

Help Wanted

As Marina Rodriguez discussed in her commentary, Help in Mexico, help is needed indeed. The United States and Mexico have had their issues over the past centuries. As noted in our textbook, nobody knows that more than the state of Texas originally named Tejas y Coahuila.

Here in the past few decades there have been a number of issues between Texas and Mexico, most notably immigration.  How does this tie into the Mexican cartels?  That is quite simple and can be summed up by two words: supply and demand. Mexico picked up on the vacation resort idea and ran with it. Cozumel, Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Acapulco, Mexico City have all realized the amounts of money that can be made from American tourists and will sell anything that isn’t nailed down. You want an all inclusive package, done. You want a cruise, sure no problem. In fact, we’ll create a cruise that stops in several tourist towns so that you can spend your dollars here. The crime rates aren’t skyrocketing in those towns. As Antonio Garza, the former US ambassador to Mexico notes, the violence is typically trafficker-on-trafficker. It’s the areas that don’t have tourism to rely on and lack economic growth that are in peril, like Ciudad Juarez near El Paso.  (Mexican Drug Trafficking) As mentioned in this article int the NY Times, the bloodshed is mostly between the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas. 

Another perspective to bring light to the issues is that the US requires an extensive process to legally immigrate into this country. A great percent of those that immigrate illegally do so because they simply cannot afford to embark on the extensively time consuming and financially draining if not completely unaffordable process. The time, energy and money required are just not realistic. Lack of jobs in their area cause them to move into areas like Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California where they can find jobs until they are booted and sent back to Mexico. In the meantime, those drug cartels have found a very lucrative way to sustain their living. As long as the demand for drugs is high in the United States, the supply will continue its steady stream. The violence and killings, reported as high as 47,515 drug related deaths since 2006, are a direct result of the cartels ridding themselves of completion and livelihood. In the end, it all boils down to the need for jobs and economic growth. The problem involves both countries and US and Mexican government need to both be part of the solution.