It’s been a tough couple weeks for independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman. For starters, his campaign has been fielding a handful of nasty e-mails regarding the Kinkster’s health care plan, dubbed TexasCare, which he unveiled Oct. 18. Essentially, the TexasCare plan would offer subsidized health coverage for all Texans, paid for on a sliding scale – thus, single folks sans kids, for example, would pay the most for coverage.
While this all seems perfectly logical, Friedman press secretary Laura Stromberg says she’s gotten more than one piece of hate e-mail suggesting the TexasCare plan is – oh, the horror! – nothing more than socialized medicine. Well, duh. Apparently, folks are ticked that they’d be asked to pay more, so that others – like single minimum wage earning parents – could pay less. News flash: we’re already footing the bill for the uninsured – and at a much higher cost, incurred through things like ambulance trips, emergency room visits, education spending, etc. (Stromberg said one angry individual shrilly suggested that Kinky’s intention was to turn “Texas into Canada” – please, we should be so lucky.)
While the flack over the TexasCare plan sounds like so much whining from the close-minded and/or the I-got-mine-and-I-wanna-keep-it-all-for-me crowd, Friedman stunned more than one supporter last week outside the Kerr Co. courthouse where he went to cast his ballot during early voting. It wasn’t that Kinky voted that was so stunning (despite his rather thin voting record), rather it was who he voted for: instead of keeping his choices to himself, the Kinkster told reporters that he cast ballots for Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and GOP Rep. Lamar Smith. As if that weren’t scary enough, upon exiting the courthouse Kinky reportedly told folks that he was “very excited” about the election. “It was time for a change,” he said. Yikes! A change? Kay Bailey, Lamar, and “change” all in the same sentence? Maybe we’re better off when the Kinkster doesn’t vote.
This article appears in Chris Bell.