Texans have reported receiving sky high bills from their private utility providers - adding insult to injury following the rolling blackouts they have suffered during the brutal winter storm Uri.

According to the New York Times, one electricity bill from Houston-based company Griddy charged Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran, $16,752.

The Washington Post reported David Astrein and his wife were charged $2,796.85 since Feb. 1 from the same comapny. These are not isolated cases.

"If you look at news outlets and social media outlets, you see pictures that are posted and I'm one of the lower bills," Astrein said, speaking to the Post. "To be thankful for that is actually crazy."

Responding to these complaints, Governor Greg Abbott convened what his office described as an 'emergency meeting' Saturday with lawmakers to discuss the issue, and the Public Utility Commission on Sunday met to sign two orders, including one that would direct energy providers to temporarily stop disconnecting customers from power or water because they have not paid," reported the Texas Tribune.

Additional measures include "an order to stop companies from sending invoices or bill estimates to customers 'until we work through issues of how we are going to financially manage the situation we are in,'" commission Chair DeAnn Walker said.

Conservative spokespeople have tried to turn this into a conversation of fossil fuels vs. renewable energy. But the fact that Texas is in this situation in the first place is not due to energy choices they have made, but are the consequences of deregulation.

As Ti-Hua Chang reporting for TYT investigates explained, "although Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) blamed progressive energy policies for the devastating power outages that hit his state during freezing winter weather, experts have pointed to other factors." These factors include "lax regulations that let the energy industry cut corners on winterizing."

Cenk Uygur deconstructs this further. "It’s called supply and demand," he says. "When you put energy companies on variable pricing depending on supply and demand, that guarantees in times of disaster you will have price gouging. Why? Because the supply will be limited. In this case it was the oil and gas that was shut down, and that is the predominant energy source in Texas."

Ana Kasparian agrees, saying, "If the power grid hadn't been privatized they wouldn't be in this situation. This is a story of what goes awry once you tie electricity to the so-called free market to a point that companies don't essentially weatherize their equipment to be able to withstand incredibly cold temperatures."

What it comes down to is Republican lawmakers in the state setting up the system for their own profits. "What the Republicans did by setting up this unregulated, so called free market, is actually crony capitalism because only a certain number of companies can get these contracts and they need government permission," said Uygur. "Under these circumstances the Republicans wrote price gouging in the law, and now they they say no one could have predicted it?"

Ti-Hua Chang gives testimony to this statement in his report by adding number values to back them up.

"Midland Energy is the largest single donor to Abbott and to Perry, his predecessor, who was tapped by Pres. Trump to run the Energy Department. Midland’s founder, Syed Javaid Anwar, has said he is friends with former Pres. George W. Bush, who hails from Midland and reportedly refers to Anwar as “J. Daddy.," he writes. "As of 2018, Anwar reportedly had donated more than $1.7 million to Texas Republicans. Abbott got more than a million dollars of that, including both cash and airplane rides."

So as it turns out, Texas chose profits over people. As Kasparian explains, "This is an issue where the companies all have wrong incentives. The lawmakers have the wrong incentives. And when the whole point is to take something that people need to survive, and to turn it into something that operates based on a profit motive, that system is going to fail."