OPINION
PRESIDIO COUNTY — Out here, when the wind quits and the flies get bad enough to make a mule cuss, that’s when the branding crew takes a water break and the talk turns serious. Last Saturday it turned to healthcare again, on account of Butch Ramsey showing up with a knot on his hand the size of a prairie dog mound and no earthly notion what it was going to cost him to find out what it was.
Butch, if you don’t know him, runs about two hundred head over past Valentine and has voted a straight Republican ticket since he can remember. He’s the kind of man who believes Washington ought to balance a budget the same way he balances a truck payment — by not spending money he ain’t got.
So, when the clinic in Alpine quoted him $1,400 just to look at his hand before they’d so much as touched it, Butch did what near half this county does anymore.
He drove down to Mexico.
He got the knot looked at, had an ultrasound, and a got prescription filled — all for less than what the Alpine clinic wanted just for the privilege of saying hello.
“Cheaper than my farrier,” Butch told us, and out here that ain’t a joke — that’s a serious unit of financial measurement.
Meantime, y’all might’ve read that a report come out saying something like 742 rural hospitals across this country are teetering on the edge, on account of the Medicaid cuts Washington was so proud of tucking into that “big, beautiful” bill.
Nearly 200 rural hospitals have shut their doors since 2005 already, and the ones still standing could lose better than half their yearly income if these cuts go the way they’re headed.
Some fella from a health policy outfit put it plain: for a lot of these little hospitals, Medicaid ain’t a line item, it’s the whole dang budget.
I don’t need a man with a fancy title to tell me that. I need somebody in Washington to do something about health care and now!
We’re living in a country where there are two Americas! One for the 1-percenter rich, and the other for the poor folks who are no better than peons for the 1 percenters.
I’m not a taking it anymore.
Meanwhile, down south, the Mexican president provided everybody with a little laminated card — your patient number, your blood type, whether you’re an organ donor, a QR code on the back — that gets any Mexican citizen — and I’m told a fair number of our own folks living down there — into any public hospital in the country.
No deductible. No network. No mystery phone tree that hangs up on you after forty-five minutes of a mariachi version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
They’ve put near $200 million behind printing and handing those cards out, which, if my arithmetic holds, is still less than what one healthcare CEO up here clears in bonuses for dreaming up new ways to deny a claim.
Now, I know what some of my fellow Republicans are fixing to say. That I’ve gone soft, or worse, that I’ve gone south, ha.
But I didn’t leave the party — the party left the ranch.
I still believe in small government and a checkbook that balances. What I don’t believe in is a government too broke to doctor its own grandmothers, but somehow flush enough to keep sending warships clear around the world to sit and idle.
Juanita Moore’s grandson, the one on that carrier off Iran, wrote his grandma again last week.
He says they’ve sent a second one now, the big one, the Ford, out to sit alongside his, and not a soul on either boat can tell you exactly what they’re waiting on except more time away from home.
Juanita says the boy sounds tired in a way that scares her.
I looked it up myself — that’s billions of dollars a month keeping a forever war warm on the other side of the planet, while back home the hospital in her own county is pushing $630,000 in the hole and arguing over which wing to close first.
And it ain’t just the money that’s got me riled, it’s the sheer stupidity.
Word out of Washington is that our “Secretary of War” — yes, that is really what they’ve taken to calling that jackass now — has decided what the exhausted folks on that carrier truly need ain’t more rest, better chow, or medical supplies, but testosterone shots.
Him and that Kennedy fellow have got it in their heads that a soldier juiced-up on hormones he never asked for, and no doctor ever ordered, makes a better fighter.
I hate to break it to those two geniuses, but we already ran this experiment, and it wasn’t in a laboratory. It was across the whole of Europe.
During World War II, the German army handed its soldiers, tank crews, and pilots amphetamines so they could roll across the continent for days on no sleep and without fear.
That drug is a good part of what fueled the Blitzkrieg — not grit, not conviction; a pill. History wrote down real plain how that experiment turned out, both for the men who took it and for the world that had to bleed to stop them.
So before our Secretary of War goes handing out shots to keep worn-out sailors fighting past the point any sane commander would’ve called them home, somebody ought to hand him a history book instead of a syringe.
Doping men into aggression ain’t strategy, it’s the same lunacy the Nazis tried, it’s just repackaged with an American label and a fancier needle.
That is not strength. That is a man who has never once sat in a rural ER after driving miles to find one.
Mexico ain’t fighting anybody’s forever war, and Mexico sure ain’t doping up its citizens to keep them fighting one. Mexico is too busy providing health care for its citizens.
So here’s my question for anybody running for office this November — Republican or not: if a country we like to make fun of for its cartels and its border troubles can figure out how to get a heart attack treated without bankrupting the whole family, why in the Sam Hill can’t we?
Don’t tell me it’s too expensive.
Tell me the truth, which is that too many folks in Washington are bought and paid for by outfits that profit off Butch’s knot costing $1,400 instead of forty dollars.
Keep the duct tape handy, say your prayers and keep the truck gassed up in case Ojinaga’s the shorter drive for health care.
And, come November, vote like your hospital’s life depends on it.
Out here, it just might.
Best Regards,
Constance Truthe
