Why Texas Needs Health-Care Reform: State Sen. Rodney Ellis, Democrat of Houston, has come up with one of the best short explanations we've seen of the urgent need for health-care reform in our state. His latest e-mail newsletter just lays out the facts:

 

--One in four Texans is uninsured, the highest rate of uninsured in the country.

--Texas ranks 51 in access to care in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

--In the past five years, Texans saw insurance premiums jump 40 percent. That is 10 times faster that the increase in Texans' income.

--Texans pay the third highest premiums in the country.

--In Texas, we pay more, for less. The Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research rates the quality of health care in Texas as "weak," in comparison to other states.

--Texas businesses and families shoulder the hidden tax of roughly $1,800 per year on premiums as a direct result of subsidizing the costs of the uninsured.

--Health care costs are the number one cause of bankruptcy.

Health-Care Reform Is Getting Closer. It Needs to be the Real Thing: The committee votes in Congress are all done. Floor fights in the U.S. House and Senate chambers are coming soon--maybe starting as soon as next week. The end-game, with negotiations between the House and Senate and the vote on a final deal, is in sight, before the year is out.

 

Now more than ever your voice needs to be heard, so the end-product is the real health-care prescription we need, not something ineffective or even harmful. Americans need to stand up and tell Congress and the White House that health-care reform has to be done right.

 

Upcoming hotlines will equip you with new messages and media tools you can use to make yourself heard. Meanwhile, like Sen. Ellis, we're getting to the point where we can boil our message to Congress and the White House down to a few key points. Here they are:

  * Don't tax employee health benefits.

  * Don’t let employers eliminate health coverage.

  * Give consumers the choice of a public health plan–hold down costs by making insurance companies compete.

  * Ban discrimination based on pre-existing conditions.

  * Make it easy and cheap to get preventive care.

  * Make premiums and out-of-pocket costs affordable for all--limit a family's health-care outlays to a manageable percentage of family income.

  * Make sure employers and the highest-income households (top 2 percent = $250,000 a year and up) pay their fair share.