What does a health crisis look like? See Houston
Enlarge	By Thomas B. Shea, for USA TODAY
Angel Martinez, left, who had ankle surgery, waits with his mother, Elvia Martinez, and Jorge Jimenes, who broke his knee, at Ben Taub General Hospital. Non-emergency patients often wait hours for care.

	By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

HOUSTON — Ijeoma Onye awoke one day last month short of breath, her head pounding. Her daughter, Ebere Hawkins, drove her 45 minutes from Katy, Texas, to Ben Taub General Hospital, where people without health insurance pay little or nothing for treatment.

Onye, 62, waited four hours to be seen. Still, going to the emergency room was faster than getting an appointment. For that, "you have to wait months," Hawkins says.

Ben Taub is the hub of the Harris County Hospital District, a network of hospitals and care centers serving the Houston area's 1.1 million uninsured residents and hundreds of thousands more with little coverage. Here, the national statistic of 45 million uninsured people is more than a number. It's a crisis.

Nationally, more than 15% are uninsured. In Texas it's nearly 24%, the Census Bureau says, the highest percentage among the states. Here in Harris County, it's 30%, according to state figures, the highest rate among the nation's top 10 metropolitan areas.

As the Houston area struggles to deal with a rising tide of uninsured, it offers a lesson for the nation: Let the problem get out of hand — to a point where nearly 1 in 3 people have no coverage — and you won't just have a less healthy population. You'll have an overwhelmed health care system.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-06-18-texas-health-care_N.htm