AS IF to prove the main point of the preceding post -- that the Houston Chronicle neither understands nor respects Texas -- the paper today royally blesses out our unworthy state.
And for what? As usual, for being insufficiently like other states.
While Texas lawmakers failed to pass legislation this year expanding health insurance coverage [through the federal Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)] for the state's poorest children, states equally hard hit by the recession found ways to do so.
Thus Texas will maintain its disgraceful title as the nation's leader in the number of uninsured youngsters, with more than 1.5 million who have no health coverage.
(Editorial, "Telling comparison: When it comes to helping the helpless, Texas leaders maintain a disgraceful record," Houston Chronicle, June 24, 2009)
Let's start with the subhead -- "helping the helpless." That's typical liberal overstatement designed to bar the door to fact and reason.
Few of the children in question are truly "helpless" in the sense that matters. They have adult caregivers, typically called parents, who attend to their needs to some degree and are legally and morally responsible for doing so. Furthermore, because that subset of human nature called parental love, most of the caregivers wish to, and do, help their children.
And children who can be taken care of to some degree -- whether on pain of law or moral failure, or by force of parental love -- are, by relevant definition, not "helpless." It is only in the mind of statists that "helplessness" is defined by whether a person receives money from the government. Poor children well may need or deserve additional help, but that's a different thing from being "helpless."
References to "the state's poorest children" and "the poorest young Texans" are also overstatements. The poorest children are not under CHIP at all. They're under Medicaid. The whole point of CHIP is to extend coverage to children who are less poor -- more precisely, whose households are less poor -- than the Medicaid standard. The debate is not about "the poorest"; it's about whether (and how far) to extend coverage into the middle class.
All advocates load their rhetoric, I suppose, but the Chronicle loads it to a degree that crosses into intellectual dishonesty.
The editorial ends -- typically -- with outright mockery of Texas.
As health care [read health-care] advocate in New Mexico, Sharon Kayne, put it, "Thank goodness for Texas, because it has been the only state that ranks lower than we do in our inability to provide health care to our most vulnerable residents."
(Ms. Kayne has the lingo down. "Most vulnerable?" Not if she's talking about CHIP; the "most vulnerable" are covered by Medicaid. And "residents?" That's to avoid citizens, a word liberals rarely use anymore except with of the world. Limiting aid to citizens would exclude illegal immigrants (and others) from the liberals' beneficence with other people's money.)
Now comes the fun part. Why didn't the Chronicle, in shaming Texas, remember its usual model of good public policy and moral rectitude, California? To find out, let's read the New York Times story that prompted the editorial.
[As California struggles] to close the country's largest budget gap, the state on Friday imposed a freeze on new [CHIP] enrollments.
California officials estimate that up to 350,000 eligible children may be relegated to a waiting list, and that attrition could lower enrollment by 250,000 by June. If money is not found, the losses there might overwhelm the cumulative gains [in CHIP enrollment] in other states.
There you have it. The state that most nearly resembles the utopia of the Chronicle's dreams -- California! -- is flat broke, precisely because it has trampled over economic and fiscal limits to pursue those kinds of dreams.
Blithely undeterred, however, our local editorialists now whip us onward, ever onward, toward the same fiscal precipice, all the while shouting insults -- "Disgraceful! Disgraceful!" -- into the wind.
Who are these people? What have we done to deserve them?
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from blogHouston.
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