UPDATE: ‘Rick Perry Wanted Bi-National Health Insurance with Mexico’

UPDATED Below Original Posting

August 30, 2011, 3:04pm

"Rick Perry at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana," photo, Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia

As posted in RedState:

Rick Perry Wanted Bi-National Health Insurance With Mexico

Posted by rightwingnut2 (Profile)

Sunday, August 28th at 10:18PM EDT

41 Comments

I just read the text of Rick Perry’s remarks to the Border Summit on Aug, 21st 2001. How in the hell is this stuff slipping through the cracks without a single mention in the conservative press? If this had been Obama, Sean Hannity would have been talking about it 24/7 during the last presidential campaign.

There are many passages in the speech that are of great concern to me, but this one really caught my attention.

…Legislation authored by border legislators Pat Haggerty and Eddie Lucio establishes an important study that will look at the feasibility of bi-national health insurance. This study recognizes that the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border compose one region, and we must address health care problems throughout that region. That’s why I am also excited that Texas Secretary of State Henry Cuellar is working on an initiative that could extend the benefits of telemedicine to individuals living on the Mexican side of the border….

Does Rick Perry still support an international health insurance program such as the one he laid out in his speech that day? Will someone in the media please ask him before it’s too late?

You can read the entire text of Perry’s speech HERE.

Since that is posted in an open forum, we repost it in its entirety.  (Rightwingnut2 may notify us if he wishes us to change that, but we highly doubt he will.)

Perry goes on to proclaim, emphasis added:

We must say to every Texas child learning in a Texas classroom, “we don’t care where you come from, but where you are going, and we are going to do everything we can to help you get there.” And that vision must include the children of undocumented workers. That’s why Texas took the national lead in allowing such deserving young minds to attend a Texas college at a resident rate. Those young minds are a part of a new generation of leaders, the doors of higher education must be open to them. The message is simple: educacion es el futuro, y si se puede.

“Si se puede,” in addition to being regurgitated like by the Obama 2008 campaign like a cattle heard (In English, “Yes we can”) is the slogan propounded by neo-Marxist unionista leaders, including the famous/infamous Cesar Chavez.

In defense of rightwingnut2 and to come to the aid of any reader who is eager to grasp a cool, refreshing presidential draft and drink deeply, have faith and to quote another legendary latino…

 h/t: Cyndi

A Washington Post article on 9/1, “Rick Perry Was Right on Binational Health Insurance,” came to the defense of Gov. Perry’s lauding of this sturdy promoting Texas-Mexico health insurance. It indicated this would propose private, not national health insurance, though labeld “bi-national.”

That is not necessarily the issue, but I explain that in bullet points a bit further down.

Post reporter Sarah Kliff assures, “he pointed to a newly passed Texas law, which directed the state to explore allowing private health plans to cover services in Texas and Mexico. Those plans would then be available to any Mexican national or American citizen working within 62 miles of the Texas-Mexico border.”

The report and opinoin continues:

There’s a lot to like about this idea.

First, it targets a big problem in Texas: a lack of insurance. With 26 percent of Texans lacking insurance, the state has the highest rate of uninsured people in the country. Those numbers are even higher in Texas’s border region, according to a 2003 Texas State Senate report.

Second, it’s a private market approach, that would allow insurers to meet an unfilled consumer need. A 2005 study showed that 72 percent of Mexico-born residents of the United States would be interested in a product that covered medical services in Mexico, especially if they had dependents in Mexico who could use those services.

The plan Perry referenced wouldn’t have the state create such a plan. Rather, it would alter Texas’s insurance regulations to allow private carriers to do so.

full article

My point of view:

• Why be all “bi-national” about it?  Health insurers and the insured should be free to arrange insurance for coverage, no matter where, on, or perhaps eventually, off the planet under limitations of reasonability (e.g., non-cooperative or bilking foreign health care services, in which case America should protect its Citizens from foreign litigation). This proposal, by contrast, appears to be what that word implies, that of a bi-nationally negotiated, mutual policy of co-regulation. That is not necessarily a sin in and of itself but it must be scrutinized so as not to blur matters of Sovereignty, nor should it serve to facilitate illegal border crossing and immigration. And it should not be planted if you will, for expansion into further development of regulation by multinational apparatus and even globally governing council, which is where big, treacherous powers want to take it all.
• This does not detract from notice of the overall Citizenship blurring of the Perry administration in Texas, as evidenced in this particular instance by his promotion of taxpayer funded education for children who are Citizens of another nation by birth and not of the U.S.A.
• America must be weaned of corporate paternalism for our health care, which was a neo-feudal concoction of authoritarians such as Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Ford.  We should be in charge of our own insurance, wherever we work, or retire, and wherever we go.
• A potential shocker to conservatives and libertarians:
  Federal government should not license insurance businesses of perhaps any forms whatsoever that are for profit, which introduces a distinct conflict into such a means of sharing risk, antithetical to the interests of the insurance carriers. Neither should states be allowed to do this.  Instead, agencies of insurance should be not-for-profit and mutually owned by their constituent risk sharers. Private, for profit enterprise is about productively generating wealth and should not become even the inadvertent racketeering of profiteering from those merely trying to avoid or mitigate misfortune.