Hey Sid, rural Texans need more than this ‘maverick doctor’

The latest scandal involving Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller includes a number of sordid details.

That’s because the self-described maverick doctor at the center of the scandal, Rick Redalen, has more than one characnews ter flaw. The same could be said of most humans, of course. But Redalen’s are such that his medical license had been revoked or suspended in three states by the time he met Miller, who appointed him to the state’s rural health task force in 2016. And the Austin American-Statesman’s Sean Collins Walsh, who broke that last week, left many Texans with lingering questions.

“In Iowa, Rick Ray Redalen’s medical license was first suspended when he was convicted of perjury in a case involving his marriage to his 15-year-old former stepdaughter,” wrote Walsh.

Walsh, of course, is not to blame for Miller’s decision to appoint such a person to the rural health task force, which works with the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Health and Economic Advisory Council.

Similarly, it’s not my fault that Redalen is a self-pitying fool who tried to convince the Statesman that he and Miller bonded over their mutual commitment to working tirelessly on behalf of rural Texans.

Miller is “one of the first actual political people that I have met that talks constantly about improving health care in rural Texas and among rural Texans,” Redalen said.

“Most people aren’t interested in that,” he added.

Redalen, who is 75, may think Texans are stupid enough to believe that.

But the fact is there are many “actual political people” on both sides of the aisle who see this as a very important issue.

One such person is state Rep. J.D. Sheffield, a family physician from Gatesville who was

elected in 2012 after unseating the incumbent in that year’s Republican primary. The incumbent was Miller, whose manifest disinterest in the needs of his district was precisely what made him vulnerable.

Another such person is Julie Oliver, who is in a runoff for the Democratic nomination in Texas’ 25th Congressional District, which is widely ignored by everyone, including its representative, Roger Williams. Oliver, however, is an exception. So, just in case anyone else is curious, Texans who live in the 25th Congressional District would like reliable access to affordable health care, apparently.

My impression, in fact, is that some of the rural Texans Oliver has heard from consider that issue even more urgent than figuring out whether the Russians were actually trying to help Donald Trump win the election or if they got more than they bargained for.

Also, the 25th District is heavily gerrymandered, as you could probably guess.

So I asked Oliver, an attorney and accountant who specializes in health care finance, if the city-dwelling voters she’d met along the way are as obsessed with health care as the rural voters she’d been telling me about, who see access to lifesaving medical treatment as potentially a matter of life and death. She said yes.

I can’t confirm that Oliver is right about all of this because I, too, typically ignore the 25th Congressional District. But I believed her because in my experience, most voters do consider health care a major issue. I also find that those of us who live in cities are generally capable of grasping the concept that obstacles to access vary, in part because some people live in cities, and others live in places where nurses are vastly outnumbered by tumbleweeds.

For that matter, a couple days ago Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, was in Lubbock, and joined Chad Hasty, a conservative radio host, for a discussion that I tuned into because I wanted to hear a substantive and respectful discussion between two Texans, neither of whom is prone to gratuitously embarrassing our state.

Health care was, in fact, among the issues that came up. I wasn’t surprised by that, because O’Rourke is another example of an actual political person who spends a lot of time brooding about the various challenges that his constituents have been known to encounter during the course of this journey known as life.

And, hey, for all I know, perhaps Miller does spend a lot of time talking about the concerns of rural Texans in the privacy of his own home.

Maybe that’s what he and Redalen talked about last year, when they traveled to Israel together, so that Miller could open up trade relations with with a group of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that are not legally recognized by the United States.

But for some reason, I doubt it.