Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently issued an executive order requiring state hospitals to report their patients’ immigration status to the state.
The reasoning is that the federal government would reimburse the state for the costs of caring for immigrants living in the country illegally.
The facts about Abbott’s order
Abbott recently shared the details of the executive order X-Post:
The order states that because of the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policy, “the State of Texas bears a large percentage of the cost of medical care for individuals who are not legally present in the United States.”
These costs represent a “burden” on the Texas health care system, Abbott added.
What this means for the future
Abbott has instructed the Department of Health to do the following: from 1 November:
- Collect information about patients who are not legally present in the United States and the cost of treatment for each patient.
- Inform patients that answering questions about their legal status will not affect their treatment.
- Report this data quarterly to the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs.
- Submit an annual report directly to the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Speaker of the House of Representatives concerning the fiscal year’s costs for patients who are in the United States illegally.
This decision has been met with strong criticism from immigration rights activists. Democratic state Rep. Sylvia Garcia Booking to X that this was “unacceptable” and that Abbott was “once again engaging in social engineering and targeting immigrants.”
Texas must wait and see what impact this decision will have on the state and the nation.
Test your Texas: How many of these Jeopardy! questions can you answer?
Texas is a place full of personality, culture and history, and Jeopardy! has asked hundreds of questions/answers about the Lone Star State. How many of them can you answer correctly without Googling?
Photo credit: Aaron Savage, Townsquare Media Killeen-Temple
Can you guess these cities from their satellite photos?
I’m always up for a good brain challenge, but this one blew me away.
It’s always fun to look up addresses or cities and see them from a satellite perspective. You start to point out landmarks and things you recognize.
But what you don’t take into account is that something looks bigger or smaller than you think. So we started taking a lot of these satellite images of towns and villages around Amarillo.
As we looked at them, we thought, “How fun would it be to actually have to GUESS what these places are?” So we got to work.
Try to see how many you can guess correctly!
Gallery credit: Sarah Clark
