Messing With Texas

JESSICA CISNEROS needed to find a dentist. When she decided to challenge Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar in the upcoming Democratic primary, Cisneros quit her job and moved back in with her parents in Laredo to save money. She’d bought her own insurance plan after turning 26 last May, but it didn’t include dental, and she still had six figures in law school debt. So when Cisneros needed a root canal in July, she went with the cheapest option: Mexico.

Affordable and accessible health care is hard to come by on the border. A third of the county she lives in is uninsured. Diabetics go to Nuevo Laredo for insulin. Women go there for birth control. Cisneros met a woman who saved up for a mammogram, only to be hit with another expense out of nowhere. “She had to choose between getting the study that she needed done and fixing her AC,” Cisneros told me when we met in August. “Sometimes people just decide to go to el otro lado, right?”