The Mexicans do it on purpose. They’re still mad about the Alamo.

Better by default is better nonetheless.

Found it! Here’s a U.S. Census Dept. map showing Hispanic population as a percent of total population per state. As you can see, the numbers are a pretty close match.

Referring to that population as “Mexican immigrants” in the context of the rest of The Globalist’s discussion there is a very slick little piece of misrepresentation. Not your fault, Kevin. Just bear in mind in the future that that site is not a reliable source of information.

Let me break this down. Only a small fraction of the Southwest’s Hispanic population consists of immigrants, legal or otherwise. Most Hispanics are native-born American citizens, many of whose families have been in the United States for generations. In a historical sense they’re Mexican immigrants, but that’s like calling Minnesotans Scandinavian immigrants. And the original Hispanic population of the Southwestern states never immigrated to the United States at all. They were already here. They’d been living here in settled communities for centuries before the Anglos ever showed up. The Norteños were the ones who immigrated into their area — which at the time was not part of the United States.

The Southwest’s Hispanic population gets very irritated at being referred to as immigrants. It happens to them a lot.

But back to the discussion of schoolchildren in Texas and Vermont.

What I’d originally had in mind to say, when I entered this thread, is that Texas has vastly more natural resources than Vermont. Texas has oil, seaports, cattle, natural gas, more oil, a bunch of major industries, a long growing season, and a lot of good agricultural land.

Vermont’s a place that got stood on end and scraped down by glaciers. In a lot of areas the soil’s so thin and rocky that it’s only good for grazing a few cows. The growing season’s short, the winters are ferocious, it takes a major construction project just to put in a mile of road, and the bilingual border population isn’t interested in becoming maquiladoras.

Vermont’s a resource-poor state that manages to do what it does in spite of the natural difficulties. The state of Texas is rich in comparison. It’s just its children that are poor.

However, I think you mistook Kevin Moore, author of the first comment on this entry, for Joe, who was the one linking to The Globalist in the second comment.

(Kevin actually drew a very impressive cartoon on Mexican immigration a few weeks ago:

http://www.incontemptcomics.com/051903.html)

In other words, Texas has a child minority population that is 17.7 times Vermont’s child minority population, in relative terms. If minorities are disadvantaged in this country — and surely they are — how could such disparate levels of minority populations not have an effect on how many children get health insurance?

And you don’t have to resort to speculation about natural resources either. Look at income tables, such as this one from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (That’s a liberal outfit, in case that matters to you.) In 1994-96, the bottom fifth of families with children in Vermont had incomes of about $13,000, while the bottom fifth in Texas had incomes of $8,600. (Scroll down to Table 2.)

Think that extra $4,400 per year in the bottom fifth didn’t make a difference in how many Vermonters got health insurance?

Whether you look at the numbers of disadvantaged minorities or at income levels, Vermont is more likely to have a “good record” on health insurance than Texas is, no matter who the governor was of each state.

You can have a debate all you want about Bush’s policies when he was governor of Texas compared to Dean’s policies in Vermont. My only point is that it is simplistic just to say, “Look at the better figures on health insurance,” as if that alone demonstrated Dean’s superiority. Like I said, it’s comparing apples and oranges.

From 1990-2000, my state (Minnesota) has experienced a boom in immigration, legal and illegal, Latino and Somali especially. Yet if you look at the chart, for those same years, we have *improved* our scores on almost every one of the child well-being indicators: http://www.aecf.org/cgi-bin/kc.cgi?action=profile&area=Minnesota

On the other hand, during his time as governor of Texas, George Bush dropped the ball in securing federal money for the CHIP program (which provides health care funding for low-income children). http://www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=714 (So did California, one of the other states you cite above).

That’s a pretty direct link. There’s also this, from the same article:

“Texas is one of five states that has kept three barriers to Medicaid enrollment in place. As a consequence, 600,000 Medicaid eligible children in Texas are not enrolled. The Texas IAF delegations asked legislators to follow the lead of other states by removing the assets test, eliminating the face-to-face interview and lengthening the enrollment period to twelve-months instead of the current six.”

You may also want to read Molly Ivins’s recent column (creators.com seems to be down at the moment so I can’t give the URL) on the current attitude toward children in the Texas legislature.

It would actually be cheaper.

Great — you, for one, are actually talking about facts that might be relevant and helpful in explaining different rates in health insurance coverage. And maybe you’re right — maybe it’s all Bush’s fault. My only point is that it’s intellectually dishonest for people just to say, “Look how Vermont is better than Texas,” without taking into account that Vermont has higher incomes than Texas, many fewer disadvantaged minorities, etc.

And now — to change the subject a bit — why does everyone care so much about rates of health insurance coverage? Health insurance isn’t an end in and of itself. It is just a means to an end — the end being actual health care. And does anyone know whether Texas’s children get better or worse health care than Vermont’s children? Isn’t that what you should really care about?

And on that score, it is exceedingly interesting to note that Texas actually beat Vermont on infant mortality rates. According to the article Amp cited, “Texas had a rate of 5.7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The national average was 6.9 deaths per 1,000 births.” Yet when I go to the Annie Casey Foundation’s “Kids Count” page for Vermont, it shows that Vermont’s infant mortality rate is 6.0.

So on one hand, Vermont is a lily-white state where everyone has health insurance, and its infant mortality rate is 6.0. Texas is a half-minority state where a lot of kids don’t have health insurance, and the infant mortality rate is 5.7. How do you explain that, if “health insurance rates” are the be all and end all? What other factors could be involved?

Not a mistake that either of us would feel honored by…. :)