Editorial Roundup: Texas
Dallas Morning News. July 20, 2023.
Editorial: Texas has a Medicaid crisis. Why worsen it with procedural denials?
State should take extra steps to make sure that recipients receive eligibility reviews.
The pandemic is over, and the resumption of Medicaid eligibility reviews this spring has been anything but smooth.
Nearly 405,000 recipients in Texas were bounced from Medicaid rolls for procedural reasons, such as missing paperwork deadlines. Another 96,000 people lost benefits when they were deemed ineligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
While it is easy to say that rules are rules and deadlines are deadlines, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission would be wise to make sure that recipients who otherwise would be eligible for Medicaid benefits aren’t tossed from the rolls without a proper eligibility review. The state should temporarily halt procedural denials and take extra steps to make sure that recipients get an actual eligibility review instead of relying on missed deadlines and other procedural mistakes to prune the rolls.
A brief reprieve would give recipients and the state time to correct a problem that would unnecessarily add to the ranks of the uninsured in Texas. The Medicaid process can be complicated and sometimes confusing, but red tape shouldn’t be a substitute for a meaningful eligibility review.
Based on the early eligibility reviews, 81% of Texans removed from Medicaid have lost benefits on procedural grounds, a denial rate that exceeds the national average by six percentage points. Health care advocates are rightly concerned that an unknown percentage of people who could be eligible for Medicaid coverage are without insurance. Texas already has the highest number of uninsured residents in the country and the most stringent eligibility rules. Texas also has declined to expand Medicaid coverage to more uninsured, low-income Texans under the Affordable Care Act.
Health care advocates say many of those denied are children who most likely would be eligible for Medicaid or another program if they received a full review. In addition to putting low-income families in an untenable position, removing recipients from the rolls without a review could make it more difficult for parents to see a doctor to get vaccinations and medical records that they need to enroll their children in school.
Without a doubt, some Texans will lose eligibility because they now exceed income requirements, their children have aged out of the program or for other change-of-life reasons. But their removal from Medicaid rolls for those reasons should be the result of an eligibility review. Otherwise, eligible low-income families, children and disabled adults will fall through the cracks, forgo medical treatment or end up in county hospital emergency rooms. And that is not good for these patients or taxpayers in this state.
The federal government wisely allowed Medicaid recipients to retain coverage during the pandemic to prevent low-income Americans from losing critical health care coverage in the middle of a national health emergency. Now Texas must make sure that procedural denials don’t strip eligible recipients of much needed benefits.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. July 20, 2023.
Editorial: If Texas troopers harmed kids at border, they must pay. But spread your outrage around
Those who blanch at just about any attempt to enforce immigration laws and secure the border love to say of such policies: The cruelty is the point.
Texas has handed them a huge cudgel by placing razor wire and buoys in the Rio Grande. A Department of Public Safety officer also alleges that troopers were told to push migrants, including children, back into the water and deny them a drink in the heat. His account is unconfirmed, and state officials have disputed portions of it.
If any of it’s true, it’s an outrage. The state needs a thorough investigation into the trooper’s email, and any supervisor or trooper who promoted such behavior should be disciplined, if not fired or even brought to face criminal charges. Whatever happened, the wire must come down. It’s simply too dangerous.
Even if children were endangered or drinking water was denied, there’s no reason yet to think that it was widespread. Critics are already wildly overreaching, some attributing the order to Gov. Greg Abbott himself with no evidence to support it. Let’s not forget that in 2021, Border Patrol agents were smeared with allegations that they used whips on migrants. An investigation eventually proved what was obvious: The agents on horseback were holding reins, not whips.
Deterrence requires consequences. If border enforcement measures don’t change the risk calculus for those attempting to enter illegally, they aren’t going to work. Texans rightly recoil at the idea of razor wire cutting young children and a pregnant woman. But there’s an argument that the safest thing for migrants themselves is to push them to ports of entry for processing of asylum claims.
The state’s border security obsession gets plenty of blame here. But the underlying issue is that the state is trying to do something that the federal government should, but can’t — or won’t.
President Joe Biden’s lax policies, Mexico’s lack of cooperation to stop migrants from Central and South America, the despicable human smugglers and the home countries that terrorize or fail to provide a way to make a living — all have contributed to the intolerable situation on the U.S.-Mexico border. Migrants should understand the increasing dangers, too, particularly from smugglers, and heed Biden’s advice from January: “Do not, do not just show up at the border.”
The fix, as we’ve said frequently, is a set of rational immigration policies that combine the country’s workforce needs, compassion that is meaningful but limited, and a working asylum system that focuses on those genuinely in danger of persecution and addresses claims in a timely manner. The backlog of cases is years-long, and with so little risk of deportation, why wouldn’t an enterprising migrant try to get here?
The irony, of course, is that the U.S. is facing full employment and needs workers in all kinds of sectors, from entry-level construction to experienced doctors and nurses.
Stories of migrants who heard that Biden was opening the border in a way his predecessors did not are too frequent to dismiss. Biden’s administration finally tried to alleviate the crisis by pushing some migrants to use an online tool to request asylum and stretching immigration law to allow a certain number of people in per month. But it’s been a shell game.
So, yes, the Legislature and the U.S. Justice Department should investigate the DPS allegations and determine how high up accountability should go. But Congress must assert its authority, too, examining the administration’s actions, holding it accountable and legislating a better system.
Texas has, for years, tried to create order out of a chaos it did not create. No governor or Legislature could ignore the prospect of small border towns inundated, sometimes in a matter of days, with migrants numerous enough to match their populations.
We’ve lamented state spending and resource allocation to do what’s always been a federal job — even if the feds aren’t doing it, Texas taxpayers shouldn’t have to pick up the slack. The latest allegations show why: There’s always a risk of mistakes and outrages, especially when a stressed workforce is pushed into a job it’s not meant to do. State troopers are not Border Patrol agents.
Cruelty isn’t the point. Addressing an unsustainable situation is. Yes, Texas has gone too far. And everyone who brought us to this point bears some portion of the responsibility.
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Houston Chronicle. July 18, 2023.
Editorial: Abbott’s razor wire is maiming migrants. Cruelty is the point.
There’s a reason Native Americans called barbed wire the “ devil’s rope.”
The cruel embrace of the spikes offered 19th century settlers the solution they’d been looking for to stake their claims out west: a fence that kept cattle in, and undesirables out. Unsuspecting wild buffalo and longhorns often became ensnared, thrashing their bodies against the wire, not knowing that the more they struggled, the more they’d suffer. If hunger or thirst didn’t kill them, infections from their festering wounds would.
Though many cowboys and even ranchers protested the wire and its agonizing violence, the devil’s rope offered something too tempting: dominion.
Over countless wars, that design has been perfected into even more barbaric forms, including razor wire — the kind that Gov. Greg Abbott has strung along the Rio Grande as part of his billion-dollar border security initiative.
The war we’re fighting now, Abbott and his cronies argue, is at our southern border. And the enemy? Smugglers and organized crime, of course. But also, desperate families of men, women and children, many seeking asylum.
That includes an unsuspecting 19-year-old who became trapped in wire and writhed in pain while suffering from a miscarriage.
A man who tried to free his child from the unrelenting teeth of a razor-wrapped barrel and earned a “significant laceration” on his left leg.
A 15-year-old boy who broke his right leg in the currents because the razor wire was “laid out in a manner that it forced him into the river where it is unsafe to travel.”
And a 4-year-old girl caught trying to cross the wire and pressed back until, in the triple-digit heat, she passed out from exhaustion.
These are just a few of the disturbing images revealed in an explosive email by Nicholas Wingate, a Department of Public Safety paramedic and trooper who has sounded the alarm on the “inhumane” directives of Operation Lone Star. According to the email, obtained by Hearst Newspapers, these directives include pushing people back to Mexico at all costs, and despite the record-breaking temperatures in border cities this summer, an order prohibiting officers from handing out water to asylum seekers.
In the email to his superior, Wingate explains how, faced with a group of 120 exhausted and hungry people with small children and nursing babies in tow, the shift officer in command gave the order to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.” But the troopers didn’t feel that was right, especially “with the very real potential of exhausted people drowning.”
After expressing these concerns to command again, they were told to “tell them to go to Mexico” and to get into their vehicle and leave, which they did. Border Patrol later worked with other troopers to administer care to the migrants.
We commend the troopers courageous enough to show Abbott what a moral compass looks like.
It appears DPS officials are taking the allegations seriously. DPS Director Steven McCraw said that while there’s no official policy barring troopers from giving out water, the agency’s inspector general is investigating concerns raised in the email and an audit will assess how to minimize risks to migrants: “The smugglers care not if the migrants are injured, but we do,” he said.
At least, we should. Reporting showed that McCraw was already aware of the increase in injuries from the wire, including seven additional incidents reported by Border Patrol where migrants needed “elevated medical attention” from July 4 to July 13.
For too long, leaders — both Democratic and Republican — have struck a Faustian bargain, relying on deterrence through brutality as a substitute for thoughtful policy. Rather than “secure the border,” these tactics have only increased the number of human remains that wash up on the Rio Grande banks. They’ve deeply scarred too many soldiers left to do the dirty work of cowardly elected leaders, and taken the lives of several National Guardsmen.
Concertina wire and booby traps can’t distinguish between a criminal and a nursing mom. But the men and women in uniform who work our border can.
The crisis at our border is a humanitarian one and it requires humans to handle it with compassion and consideration, not a merciless barrier of deterrents. It requires clear, accessible legal pathways that encourage migrants to safely access ports of entry.
Even if DPS were to insist on humane treatment of all migrants, the cruelty won’t be forgotten, especially by the family and loved ones of the men, women and children whose last breath was at our border. And the cruelty won’t really cease until Congress repairs our broken immigration system and politicians like Abbott stop their barbed assaults — in rhetoric and in weaponry — that exploit the life-or-death struggles of migrants as easy campaign kindling.
“Barbed wire proclaims that you are kept out or kept in, and, when you resist, it rips you,” W.H. Auden wrote in a poem after World War II. “Other barriers weather, crumble, grow moss; wire merely rusts, and keeps its sting.”
As it was when western lands were dominated and wrenched from Native Americans’ hands, the cruelty is the point.
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San Antonio Express-News. July 19, 2023.
Editorial: Is Texas a place where people can live, work and thrive?
Texas has reached two new lows, according to a CNBC ranking.
For the first time, Texas was last in the nation for quality of life, and it slid out of the top five best states for business in the annual report.
The state received a mixed report card. In addition to earning an F for “life, health and inclusion,” Texas earned C+s for education and infrastructure while notching A+s for “economy” and “access to capital.”
The report cited as weaknesses Texas’ attacks on inclusiveness, reproductive rights and voters rights. It also noted the state’s weak worker protections and poor access to health care, as well as its “thirteenth-highest violent crime rate” in the nation and rank of 37 for “licensed childcare facilities per capita.”
Various state policies — such as a ban of diversity, equality and inclusion programs in state-funded schools; a refusal to expand Medicaid; and legislation targeting transgender people — contributed to the low rankings.
There’s also the state’s continued efforts aimed at limiting cities’ self-governance, most recently the so-called Death Star bill. This is particularly striking since cities are so crucial to Texas’ economic engine.
The state has landed in the bottom half of the quality-of-life rankings for a decade while maintaining its spot in the top five for business, but this year’s rankings are a sign that Texas’ politics are bogging down the state’s economic engine.
Informal rankings such as this one from CNBC are subjective, but they also raise concerns that shouldn’t be ignored — is Texas still a place where entrepreneurialism can thrive? Will diverse talent choose to work and live elsewhere?
A spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott brushed off the poor rankings in an emailed statement that said, “People and businesses vote with their feet, and continually they are choosing to move to Texas more than any other state in the country.”
That might be true. However, “voting with their feet” works both ways. What entities and people will the state lose as it continues to pursue an agenda of regressive policies?
This report challenges the status quo of Texas politics, even if voters continue to accept that status quo. There is a tension at play that will eventually snap.
An ideal Texas is a place for all people to live, work and thrive. Is Texas such a place? The very question reveals the answer.
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