When it came to our health, my mother always crossed her fingers and kneeled at her bed at night, praying that my sister and I would not get sick. My mother, a single parent, didn’t have insurance—she couldn’t afford it, and like many folks, she lingered in limbo: she earned too much to qualify for Medicaid, but couldn’t afford private insurance.

For years, however, my mother did have insurance, but with a super tight budget that comes with raising two kids on your own and paying a house mortgage on your own, she made the untimely decision to drop our health care coverage. I say untimely because a few months after she dropped our coverage, my sister was misdiagnosed by a doctor for a nagging stomachache, and weeks later, my sister had to have her appendix taken out.

According to an article in the Waco Tribune-Herald, Texas leads the nation with the highest percentage of uninsured children, and the state is on the cusp of a strange trend—100,000 fewer kids enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program this year than in late 2005. Texas officials cannot attribute this staggering decline to anything—yet. If that’s not a head-scratcher, I don’t know what is.

And then there is Illinois Governor Ron Blagojevich’s highly lauded (prematurely) universal health insurance for kids that launched a little over a week ago. Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times article cast a hovering doubt about the health plan’s ability to deliver the goods while draining state resources and the plan’s level of ambiguity. One state representative questioned Blagojevich’s motives in designing the plan. Is this universal health care for kids part of a grander populist utopia or just a platform issue on the road to reelection?