Texans are resilient in the face of an increasingly strained and inefficient healthcare system. In a state with the eighth-largest gross domestic product in the world, Texans deserve good, affordable health care. However, with the highest uninsured rate in the country, Texans suffer from poor health consequences of being uninsured, high costs of health care, and medical debt.
Because of the high costs of health care in the U.S., many Americans forego medical treatment for illness and injury even if they have health insurance. U.S.residents also have low rates of using preventive careservices in comparison to other industrialized nations. Due to the high cost of health care and low utilization rates even among insured people, those with insurance don’t access health care services much more than those without: uninsured people receive around 80% as much care as those with insurance. This comparison in access has led some researchers to argue that healthcare policy shifts should focus less on increasing coverage and more on incentivizing individual healthy choices and funding medical innovations. While making healthy choices and having access to innovative technologies are important contributors to individual health, those factors can’t protect people from the unexpected events and illnesses that often lead uninsured and underinsured people to fall into high medical debt. People who live with medical debt have worse overall health compared to those with little or none.
In this brief, Every Texan lays out policy priorities to increase coverage for health care services and increase utilization rates of health care programs in order to improve health outcomes for the Texans most likely to suffer the effects of financial toxicity: uninsured adults, underinsured adults, and their families.