The Galveston County Daily News

Between now and the Nov. 3 election, County Judge Jim Yarbrough will attempt to sell voters on a hospital district funded by a new tax of 6 cents to 8 cents per $100 of taxable property value.

We haven’t seen all the details, in which may lurk the devil, but we support the concept and urge elected and civic leaders to stand up and do so as well.

There’s too much at stake to do otherwise.

The core issue is the future of the University of Texas Medical Branch — the county’s single largest employer, its largest health care provider, one of its main economic engines. Radiating from that core are many other issues that should be important to all but those with the most rigidly ideological minds.

The dominoes line up like this: Texas lawmakers last month approved a funding package to help the medical branch recover from Hurricane Ike. In it was $150 million to help build a medical tower and get the medical branch’s capacity back to the 550 or so beds it had before Hurricane Ike.

That money comes with a caveat: Local taxpayers must begin paying for specialty and hospital care for people earning income at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty level, up from 50 percent now, and 21 percent traditionally.

For example, families of four living on $22,050 a year and not covered by Medicare, Medicaid or some other insurance and meeting certain asset tests would qualify for county-sponsored care.

That’s not illegal immigrants, people from outside the county or “indigent” people, most of whom qualify for federal care. It’s mostly people who fill the service-sector jobs that keep the tourism industry running.

If local people fail to do that, the $150 million won’t come, the tower won’t be built and the medical branch will have to get by with the 330 beds it can fit into John Sealy Hospital after moving such things as the kitchen and pharmacy off the first floor. One hundred of those are prison beds so, for the public, John Sealy would be reduced by more than half.

Apparently, you can’t operate a Level-1 trauma center with a 230-bed hospital.

Are 230 beds enough to operate a serious medical school? We doubt it.

If the medical school were gone, would the University of Texas System have any reason to keep any sort of hospital here? We doubt it.

It certainly wouldn’t need to employ as many people there as it did before Ike.

The district would exclude areas and taxpayers living around Kemah, League City and Friendswood. Apparently no one thinks those suburban conservatives would support it, even though a lot of them work at the medical branch and many others of them work in service jobs.

While the medical branch’s $150 million is tied to the local tax, the local tax revenue would not be dedicated to the medical branch. Instead, the county also would contract with other providers — Mainland Medical Center and Clear Lake Regional Medical Center, for example — so people could get care where they wanted to.

The district would cost the owner of a $200,000 house between $120 and $160 a year. Because the district would take over the existing expense, however, the county’s tax rate could be cut by about 1.5 cents per $100 of taxable value, meaning a net increase of only about $90 to $130.

That’s a small price to pay to keep one the county’s most important institutions intact, and to mitigate the many long-standing problems caused by the high number of uninsured people in the county.