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Viewpoint Being poor and sick on the Texas border
By MICHAEL SEIFERT
I got up before dawn to drive
Nicolasa 45 miles for a thyroid scan. Nicolasa, a 34-year-old mother, has a
thyroid condition that is leaving her blind and at the risk of several other
complications. She is very, very nervous about this trip to the doctor, for she
wonders how she will pay for the medicine she will need. She wonders if she
will be able to raise her children. She wonders if she will live much
longer.
Although Nicolasa has been in the United States since 1991, she
hasnt been able to make much of a go of it. Her husband abandoned her in
1997, and she and her three children live from day to day, practicing a kind of
biblical faith that I am sure they would trade in for something a little less
stressful.
Nicolasa is poor, but according to the state of Texas
guidelines for obtaining help, she is not indigent as she manages
to bring in more than the $242 a month limit for a family of four. The
compassionate conservatism of our state says that anyone who can house, feed
and clothe a family of four on $242 a month is doing just fine, thank you.
But even if Nicolasa were indigent, there is no public hospital in
the Brownsville, Texas, area. For that, she would have to travel by bus more
than 350 miles to Galveston. That, of course, means finding someone to take
care of her children and crossing the border patrol checkpoint north of
Brownsville. An illegal alien, she may or may not be allowed to
continue on. Then she would finish an eight-to-10-hour bus ride, receive her
treatments and turn around and come back. She would probably end up camping out
in the waiting room for one or two days.
The Texas border is not a good place to be poor and sick, although
there are an awful lot of very poor and very sick people here. If you break an
arm, for example, and you have no money or insurance, you might go to the
emergency room, but they wont cast it for you. Women are encouraged to
get Pap smears and mammograms, but if cancer is discovered and you dont
have sufficient financial resources, you literally will be sent home to die --
unless you are indigent. An indigent patient might qualify for the long trip to
the University Hospital in Galveston. The trip back, suffering from the
exhaustion, pain and nausea of chemo or radiation treatments, is long indeed.
Not all patients keep up with the regimen, resigning themselves to their fate
of being very sick in a self-proclaimed compassionate society.
Nicolasa is a lucky sick person. While she does not qualify for
any help from the rich Texas state coffers, she is a part of our parish nursing
program. The Marist Brothers sent the program some money to cover cases like
these, so she will have her tests done, and then she should have some sort of
support to purchase her medicines.
Nicolosa is a clear reminder of the people both President Clinton
and Texas Gov. George Bush have failed. The tale of the Clinton
administrations inability to pass an effective health care plan that
would care for all U.S. residents is well known. The ineptitude of Bushs
compassion is not a well-enough-told tale. Suffice it to say that
fully 26 percent of Texans live without access to health care and that the
state is going to have to return $450 million to the federal government --
funding earmarked for uninsured children, but unused. A professor of public
health at the University of Texas remarked, This sort of inefficiency can
only be explained by the arrogance caused by much wealth in the hands of so few
people.
When we arrived at the radiology clinic, the receptionist looked
at poor, small Nicolasa, and then she looked at me, and asked, Is this
woman of sound mind? And I thought, Maybe not, not if she chose to
live here.
As we left, Nicolasa, who doesnt speak English, asked me
what the woman had said. I lied and told her, She was just worried about
you.
Nicolasa responded, Thats why I like it here. People
care about you.
On the way back to the parish, I was listening to the news about
the Republicans who had gathered in the City of Brotherly Love to celebrate
their new sound bite -- compassionate conservatism. As I left
Nicolasa in front of her two-room shack, I started thinking of how the best
things have been reduced to sound bites, to meaninglessness.
Compassion, a powerful, wonderful sense of being at one with a
suffering human being, is now just another phrase to be tossed around, to be
tested with focus groups, to be ignored.
I then turned off the radio and went to look for some
medicine.
Marist Fr. Michael Seifert works in San Felipe de Jesús
Parish in Brownsville. His e-mail address is
miguelseif@hotmail.com
National Catholic Reporter, September 15,
2000
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