Dependable Skeleton
10:40-something AM
1-9-13
If you are the owner of this dog, fear not! We picked her up out of the road and took her home for safekeeping. My mother drove around the neighborhood first, looking for anyone that seemed to be looking for a dog, but she couldn’t find anyone. We…
Early voting has started in Austin today!!! To find the closest poling site go here! Dates and hours are also posted.
So go vote if you get the chance! You’ll get a nifty sticker and internet hugs from me!
But seriously go vote. Normally I’d say I don’t care who you vote for so long as you vote… But this is tumblr and y’all knowwho to vote for. So. GO! VOTE!
In a statement published Monday morning, Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) “proudly” declared that he will decline to implement key tenets of the Affordable Care Act — a move that will see his state forgo an estimated $164 billion dollars in federal aid and leave over 1.2 million low-income Texans, who would have finally been eligible for health care, helpless and uninsured.
“This is a fiscally stupid decision on the part of Rick Perry,” Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Rebecca Acuña told Raw Story. “Texas would be one of the states that gets the most money from the federal government and the Medicaid expansion would have provided health care to more than a million Texans. It’s… It’s very sad that Rick Perry is willing to play politics with the health of Texans, and that’s exactly what this decision is.”
With his announcement, Perry becomes the sixth governor to refuse implementing a key aspect of the Affordable Care Act: the Medicaid expansion and the state-based health care exchanges. Republican governors in Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Wisconsin have made similar decisions, but Texas is by far the biggest.
Perry would seem to be inviting a political free-for-all thanks to the relative size and power of the Texas hospital industry, which absorbed more than $4.6 billion in unpaid emergency medical costs in 2010. While not seeing it as a cure-all, Texas hospitals largely praised the Affordable Care Act for dramatically expanding health care options for poor people, who are ultimately paid for by others who carry their own insurance. Nearly 25 percent of Texans — 6.5 million people — do not have health insurance, including more than 1.2 million children, and the state’s health care system ranks last in the nation overall.
WATCH: Perry says Medicaid expansion like ‘adding 1,000 people to the Titanic’
My boobs had something to add to this conversation.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck Rick Perry
(via brashblacknonbeliever)
By Andrea Grimes
Texas Republican House Representative Bill Zedler couldn’t get the anti-choice amendment he proposed during last year’s special lawmaking session approved by his peers in the legislature—he’d like to gather as much information as possible on women seeking, and doctors performing, abortions—so he’s asked the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to do it for him. And at a meeting held last week in Austin, it became clear the DSHS brass is happy to help him out.
The Texas DSHS called the abortion provider stakeholders meeting one afternoon last week to begin the process of getting public comment on “updated reporting requirements” instituted at the behest of Rep. Zedler.
It confirms the worst fears of abortion providers who suspected, when they were notified a week before about the meeting, “that the truth the state is hiding is that it now means to implement by regulation what it has failed for the past several years to accomplish through legislation.”
Texas is, for lack of a stronger word, a MESS.
Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.
[NB: More people than just cis women are affected by this underhanded subterfuge and these new regulations.]
What. The. Fuck.
(via keepyourbsoutofmyuterus)
Oh, Texas. I love you, Austin. You are my home. But this state? This state constantly and rather consistently breaks my heart. Also, I fucking hate Rick Perry.
From Misty at Shakesville:
Last Thursday I posted about how Ohio has written a Medicaid work-around for defunding Planned Parenthood. Well that little strategy was copied (almost word-for-word, I suspect a lobby writing this and giving it to congressepeople) in recently signed Texas legislation. Rick Perry signed, late Tuesday, SB 7 (various format download), which is a huge piece of legislation overhauling health care access/payments/etc within the state of Texas. Buried in that is distribution for family planning services (pages 90 & 91 in .pdf format). […]
They want to take away funding for all of the clinics and over 78K+ people will lose their health care center. How many people are employed that will lose their jobs because PP in Texas has to close clinics? Rick Perry, by the way, is toying with the idea of a presidential run.
Goddamnit Texas….
