I am tired of hearing that so many Texans have no health plan. It is not true, and it is a little insulting to them. They have a plan. It has bright lights and a sliding glass door, and it is open every hour of every day of the year. It is called the emergency room, and I am not embarrassed to say so.
Think about what a plan is. A plan is knowing where you will go when something goes wrong. By that measure, most of the uninsured folks I know have a better plan than I do. They know exactly where they are going. They know the parking lot and which door to use after midnight. They have thought it through.
I will admit something that people on my side of the aisle do not like to say out loud. I do not think the emergency room is the cheapest way to take care of a sick man. I suspect it is the most expensive way there is. But I have never believed cheap was the same as good. My father bought the cheapest tractor in the county once, and he regretted it for years. You pay for quality. The emergency room is quality.
There is also something honest about it. A man who goes to the doctor every year for a checkup is planning to be sick. A man who goes only to the emergency room is planning to be well, right up until the moment he isn’t. I find that optimism admirable. It is the same optimism that built this state. We did not fence the frontier by worrying about what might go wrong.
Now, somebody does pay those bills in the end. I suppose it is all of us, one way or another, folded into everybody’s costs where nobody can see it. I have never looked into that and I do not intend to. If I am paying for my neighbor’s visit somewhere down the line, I would rather not know which line. It is a kind of charity that does not embarrass anybody, least of all me.
The waiting is long, a neighbor tells me. Hours, the night he went. But waiting never hurt anybody who could afford to wait. And the people in those chairs are not strangers for long. They talk. They share what they brought from the vending machine. I have heard it described as a community, and I believe that, the same way I believe in any place people have no choice but to be together.
I would not take this plan away from anyone. It has worked for a long time, and it asks nothing of the people who use it until the very end, when it asks for everything.
I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall so that this plan stays the plan. The other side, I gather, wants these folks covered before they ever reach the sliding door, and I see no reason to fix a plan that is open all night.
It is a good plan. I am glad it is not mine.
D. M.