Eight of 10 States with the Lowest Insured Rates are 'Right to Work'

by Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor

Pointing out that Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants to roll back health care reform, We Party Patriots notes that:

...Texas has the worst healthcare of any state in the union with nearly a quarter of its residents uninsured. This leaves the state in a vulnerable position because when the uninsured need emergency care and cannot pay, the burden of the cost gets placed on the Hospitals and Doctors who treat them. That cost then gets passed on to everyone else.

By cutting low cost health programs for the underprivileged, Texas has set itself up for a walk on the high wire of healthcare with no safety net.  The private insurance available is in such demand that many find themselves priced out. According to the LA Times, only Mississippi has higher healthcare costs than Texas.

It comes as little surprise that Texas would have such poor insurance statistics to go with itsminimum wage jobs and failure to require workers compensation.

But it's not just Texas:

Florida is also lacking proper services with 22.4 percent of its people uninsured. Georgia is weighing in at 20.5 percent while Arizona is also sharing the circle of shame with an uninsured population of 19.6 percent. There are many correlations here, the foremost being that traditionally conservative-leaning states allow their people to go uninsured. The catch-22 is that they have unhealthy populations and therefore their hospitals and doctors’ offices are working at capacity and the buck is being passed to the insured. This kind of taxpayer burden is specifically what these politicians claim to oppose.

Another correlation is that among the top 10 states with the highest amount of uninsured residents, 8 are “Right-to-Work” states (Texas, Mississippi, Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Georgia). The take away from these new findings is that the farther to the Right of the political spectrum your state lays the more uninsured people you will have. The more uninsured people you have will, the less efficient your state’s system will be and the bigger the burden on the almighty taxpayer.

As we know, correlation is not causation, but that's one hell of a correlation. What it points to, as if we needed another piece of evidence, is that for all the claims that anti-union legislation like "Right to Work" is based on concern for workers, in fact the states that pass such legislation demonstrate their contempt for all workers, not just the union ones, in myriad ways.