The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to widen differences in health care delivery between blue and red states, the LA Times recently reported.
"Blue states and red states are moving in very different directions," Kaiser Family Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Drew Altman was quoted in the Monday, May 25 LA Times news story.
The divergence between red and blue states is "starkly" illustrated by differences between health care delivery in California compared to Texas, the most populous states in the U.S., the news story said.
California moved more aggressively than almost any other state to adopt provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare after former President Barack Obama, the news story said.
California expanded its Medicaid program and dropped the number of its working adults without health insurance from almost a quarter of its population to only one in 10.
Texas, by contrast, became the epicenter of Republican resistance to the Affordable Care Act, blocked Medicaid expansion and left more than 750,000 low-income residents without access to health insurance, the article stated.
“We’re about 15 years behind California in terms of taking on costs in a meaningful way,” said Tom Banning, head of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians.
In early May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began allowing Texas retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters and other venues to open at 25% capacity, just a couple of weeks before new daily records were set in in the state for COVID-19 cases and deaths.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a more conservative reopening, allowing the state to enter phase two of a four-phase re-open plan much later in May.
California currently is planning expansion of its federal health care law protections, Texas remains about 15 years behind the west coast state, according to the news story.
"Texas offers no such aid to the 1.1 million people who get marketplace coverage there," the news story said. "Nor does the state have any plans to expand consumer protections."
Now the divide between red state Texas and blue state California, like the same divide between other red and blue states in the nation is about to get worse, according to the news story.
The news story cited predications by Legacy Community Health, a nonprofit in Baytown, Texas that serves poor patients, to expect the number of uninsured adults it cares for to surge up to 40%. That surge is expected because of the pandemic but also because of the major downturn of the state's oil industry.
