Every so often a reader sends me the news that Texas has the highest share of residents without health insurance of any state. They send it the way you would hand a man his own X-ray, as if they expect me to sit down. I have thought about it for a while now, and I have decided it is some of the best news we have had.
Consider what that measures. It measures how many Texans wake up every morning with nobody standing between them and their own judgment. No card in the wallet. No network. No clerk in an office somewhere deciding which doctor they are allowed to see. Just a grown man and his own two feet, and the hope that both of them hold.
My granddad drove a pickup for most of his life without a spare tire. He said a spare made a man careless. If you know you have one, you take the gravel road too fast. If you know you don’t, you drive like everything depends on it, because it does. He had a flat more than once. He walked home each time, and he told those stories at Thanksgiving for the rest of his life.
A man with insurance drives like a man with a spare. He goes in for a cough. He has the spot on his arm looked at. He takes the gravel road a little fast. Going without teaches you something he will never learn, which is how to listen to your body and then argue with it. Most of the time you win the argument.
I know the objection, because I have heard it at church. Somebody always has a neighbor who waited on a pain until there was nothing left to be done. I am sorry for that neighbor, and I mean it. But I notice nobody ever sends me the story of the folks who waited and turned out fine. There are a lot of them, I expect. They just don’t make the news, because nothing happened to them.
Freedom has always come with a price, and I would rather a Texan pay it in worry than in premiums. Worry is at least his own. Nobody mails him a bill for it, and nobody in another state gets to set the rate.
There are people who look at that number and see a problem waiting for somebody to solve it. I look at it and see a state full of people who have chosen to trust the Lord, their mothers’ remedies and a good night’s sleep. That is not a gap in coverage. That is a kind of faith, and I would not want to be the one to take it from them.
That is why I am casting my vote this fall for the Republican for Senate. My sense is that the other side would like to see a good many more of these folks covered, and I would rather the number stay right where it is.
I carry a card myself, for my wife’s peace of mind. I admire the men who don’t.
D. M.