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Most uninsured Texas children have working parents

A sobering article appeared yesterday in the Austin American Statesman. There are plenty of misconceptions about who the uninsured are in this state, and this article helps dispel some of them.

When we partnered with The Ray Marshall Center at UT, to research the most pressing health and human service issues facing Central Texas, we received similar disturbing wake up calls about the reality of limited health care access in our community.

Our new approach to funding Health-related programs is focused on filling gaps in community healthcare that need the most attention–because we know that with funding, volunteer and advocacy support, articles like this can be replaced with good news of more Central Texans receiving the healthcare access they deserve.

An excerpt of the article:

Texas still has more uninsured children than any other state, and a new analysis shows that those children aren’t who people may think.

The majority of uninsured children in Texas — 89.5 percent — have at least one working parent, according to Families USA , a Washington-based nonprofit group that commissioned the analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“There’s some mythology about uninsured families and uninsured children, and that mythology essentially tends to think about the uninsured being people who are looking for a handout, who are seeking welfare, when the precise opposite is true,” said Ron Pollack , executive director of Families USA, which advocates making health care available to all Americans. “These are people who play by the rules. They work hard; they pay taxes.”

Click here to read the entire article

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