Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is famously not the sharpest tool in the Republican shed, but wow. In an appearance on
Fox News Sunday, Perry insisted that Texas's high rate of uninsured people
just doesn't matter, because "that's not how we keep score."
WALLACE: One more question about Main Street or looking out for the little guy. When you were governor of Texas, your state had the highest uninsured rate in the country. One in five, more than one in five Texans didn't have health coverage, and yet you refused to set up a state exchange under Obamacare. You refused to expand Medicaid. Is that looking out for the little guy when 21 percent of Texans didn't have health insurance?
PERRY: If how you keep score is how many people you force to buy insurance, then I would say that that's how you keep score. That's not how we --
Perry then explained that Texas has tort reform instead of Medicaid expansion or a state exchange, and that the real issue is "whether Texans have access to good health care," and as far as those 21 percent of Texans without health insurance:
PERRY: That's not how we keep score. I think it's a fallacy to say access to healthcare is all about insurance. What we happen to say in the state of Texas is we're going to try to make as assessable as we can good, quality healthcare. And that's what we've done in the state of Texas.
How convenient for Rick Perry that Rick Perry's way of keeping score on access to health care does not include the percent of people with health insurance. In the United States, access to health care—at least access that won't bankrupt you—means either having insurance or being so rich you can pay any possible healthcare expense out of pocket. And you have to be in about the top 0.1 percent for the latter to be true, so the one in five Texans who are uninsured probably didn't really care that by Perry's way of keeping score, they had access to health care because of tort reform and the fact that there were doctors in their communities, because they could not afford to go to those doctors. What a great plank for a presidential platform: Don't worry about health insurance; let me tell you about my alternative scorekeeping system.
It can go right alongside Rand Paul's self-certification as an ophthalmologist.
(Via)