Fact-check: About 1 in 4 women of reproductive age in Texas are uninsured

Austin American-Statesman (TX)

March 29-- Mar. 29--Texas House members debated the finer points of their biennial budget proposal well into the night on Wednesday, proposing amendments, amendments to those amendments and ultimately passing the massive $251 billion bill.

One amendment (which was shot down in a party-line vote, with Republicans in opposition) would have required the state to accept federal Medicaid expansion dollars to cover low-income Texans. Texas is one of 14 states that has not opted to expand Medicaid.

Rep. John Bucy III introduced the amendment and said Texans are losing out on quality health care by not expanding the insurance program.

"Right now, 1 in 4 Texas women of reproductive age are uninsured, totaling 1.5 million Texas women," said Bucy, a Democrat who represents a portion of Williamson County. "While many of these women qualify for health care coverage during pregnancy, they lose that care shortly thereafter."

Bucy shared the same claim about uninsured women in a post on Twitter during the debate. So we had to ask, are there really that many Texas women without health insurance?

State agencies don't track this number

Allison Heinrich, Bucy's legislative director, said the statistic came from a letter an advocacy group sent to the Texas Senate's Health and Human Services Committee in September.

The letter states that 1 in 4 Texas women between the ages of 15 and 44 are uninsured.

Laura Guerra-Cardus of the Cover Texas Now coalition and the Children's Defense Fund said the data came from a 2016 report published by the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities.

The report states that about 27 percent of women of childbearing age in Texas are uninsured.

Officials with the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Texas Department of Insurance said their respective agencies do not track the uninsured population in Texas.

Census Bureau data backs up the claim

The report cited the Census Bureau's American Community Survey and person-level data sets used by researchers. This information allows users to examine a sample of individual responses to the survey and extrapolate about things like the number of uninsured women in a particular age bracket.

Oliver Bernstein, spokesman for the left-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities, said researchers at the center plugged the data into statistical software to come to the conclusion that 1 in 4 women between the ages of 15 and 44 are uninsured in Texas, as of the 2016 report.

This type of data analysis is common. The Urban Institute conducted a similar study of the uninsured population in Texas in December using the same data.

They didn't look specifically at uninsured women of reproductive age, but found that about 18 percent of all women in Texas are uninsured.

The Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that is pro-abortion rights, published a study in December that looked at the uninsured rate of women of reproductive age using the same data.

The group's analysis found that of the 5.9 million Texas women between 15 and 44, about 1.4 million (or 24 percent) are uninsured. This means about 1 in 4 women in this age bracket don't have health insurance.

Published data from the Census Bureau support Bucy's claim. That data doesn't allow for a calculation of the uninsured rate of women 15-44, but it does allow for the calculation of the uninsured rate for women 19-44.

Of the 5.2 million Texas women in that age range, more than 1.2 million do not have health insurance, which means about 1 in 4 are uninsured.

Our ruling

Bucy said, "1 in 4 Texas women of reproductive age are uninsured, totaling 1.5 million Texas women."

His source was a report from an Austin-based group that conducted an analysis of Census Bureau numbers. The research method is one that has been used by other organizations and a study from the Guttmacher Institute had similar findings.

An analysis of publicly available Census Bureau numbers supports Bucy's claim.

We rate this claim True.

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