Ouch!

Texas in bad shape: Lone Star State at bottom of the pack in health carerankings

While we generally love being at the top of every ranking, the latest findings from The Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHCRQ) are a little harder to swallow.

According to the 12-item scorecard, the great Republic of Texas ranked "Weak" or "Very Weak" in nine categories including Preventive Measures, Home Health Care Measures and Hospital Care Measures.

Maybe the Agency is just out to get Texas, but there is no denying that we have the highest percentage of uninsured citizens of any state in the country. According to the Texas Medical Association's latest count, the current estimation is about 5 million Texans without access to health insurance, as high as one in three persons in major cities like Austin and Houston.

Texas has also been in the news over the past year regarding the highly public defunding of Texas Planned Parenthood offices and other low-income women's health providers due to suspicions of performing abortions.

When Governor Perry proposed a law to exclude Planned Parenthood from future state funding, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services supplied pressure by announcing they would in turn cut off all funding to Texas's family planning efforts. Thankfully, the funds are in position for now, but the future looks a bit bleak.

Ironically, the one category Texas received a "Good" rating on from the AHCRQ was for Maternal Health and Child Health Care Measures.

Clearly, we've got some work to do. But first we need a bit of an attitude adjustment. And the best way I know to do that is to see who we're up against in the rankings and appeal to some Texas pride.

After all, filling out the top of the bottom with Texas on the rankings are No. 2 Kentucky (with two "Average" rankings above us) and No. 3 New Mexico (with three "Average" rankings). Even West Virginia (No. 4) and Oklahoma (No. 6) ranked higher than us.

So if we're going to make it back up to the top of the herd, we need to start making some serious changes. Only 49 states to go...

You gotta love an underdog story.

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More Foraging

Free 'food forest' in East Austin expands with thousands of new plants

Angelina Alanis at Festival Beach Food Forest

Photo courtesy of KVUE

Angelina Alanis gives a tour of the garden, which is open to anyone.

In East Austin, there is an edible forest garden called Festival Beach Food Forest where anyone can walk around and harvest free produce, nuts, medicinal plant leaves and herbs. And over the summer, it grew to several times its size.

The forest has fig trees, peach trees, grapevines, asparagus and more that's not in season right now. You can grab passionfruit and plants like yaupon holly, with leaves that can make a caffeinated tea, rosemary and lemon balm.

"[Lemon balm] is part of the mint family," said Angelina Alanis, communication and partnership coordinator for Festival Beach Food Forest. "It has a lemony taste but it's good for a nervous stomach. I'm prone to anxiety so I always grab a hunk."

The food forest is located right next to Interstate 35 and Lady Bird Lake on 29 Waller St., near a part of town that's known for being a food desert, lacking grocery stores.

"There's as much as a 20-year life expectancy difference between parts of East and West Austin, and a lot of that comes down to food access, health care access and also access to nature."

Alanis said for the past nine years, the volunteer-based grassroots project been helping with the issue and just recently expanded in the summer from two-thirds of an acre of city parkland to over 3.5 acres.

"We're going to have hundreds of new trees," said Alanis. "We've already planted 150 new trees in the area and then thousands of plants on the ground."

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They also plan to add a community kitchen and a pavilion to do things like cooking classes or informational sessions.

Read the full story at KVUE.com.

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