Texas has the highest share of uninsured residents in the nation. Another COVID-19 wave puts them

[TexasTowelie]

Texas has the highest share of uninsured residents in the nation. Another COVID-19 wave puts them at risk.

by Eleanor Kilbanoff, Texas Tribune


So much of the last two years has felt surreal for the staff at Centro De Salud Familiar La Fe, a federally qualified health center in El Paso. Seemingly overnight, the women’s health center became a coronavirus unit. They began offering COVID-19 testing, and then, as soon as they could, vaccine pop-ups. They’ve made public service announcements and gone door to door, encouraging people to get vaccinated.

But despite the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, some things did not come as a surprise — like how hard it hit their low-income and uninsured clients.

“This area has been hurting for a long time,” spokesperson Estela Reyes-López said. “We do not get the funding that we need. We don’t have the medical providers that we need. … The situation with the coronavirus just exacerbated things that were already happening.”

La Fe primarily serves low-income and uninsured Texans, and it has seen firsthand the disparate impact the pandemic has had on the most vulnerable communities. Many work hourly, public-facing jobs that don’t allow them to wait in line for COVID-19 tests — or take time off to quarantine. Others have chronic, untreated health conditions that make them more susceptible to severe cases of the disease. Nationally, uninsured people have lagged behind in vaccination rates.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/22/omicron-texas-uninsured-low-income/