Like Ted Cruz, Beto O'Rourke had a fiery, charismatic father. The similarities end there.

Pat O’Rourke, left, with his son Beto O’Rourke in an

undated photo. (Photo: courtesy Facebook/Beto O’Rourke).

EL PASO, Texas — In January 1986, an unusual piece of mail arrived at the White House. Addressed directly to President Ronald Reagan, it was a bill for $10 million from the county of El Paso, Texas, a sprawling desert community along the border with Mexico that at the time was one of the country’s poorest cities.

Resembling an actual hospital bill, the statement demanded an immediate payment of $7.5 million for the treatment of “undocumented aliens” who had sought emergency care the year before at R.E. Thomason General Hospital, El Paso’s only public medical facility and the one closest to Mexico. It asked for another $2.5 million for overdue Medicare-Medicaid reimbursements that helped cover bills for the poor — payments that had been frozen amid a dispute between the administration and Congress over proposed federal health care cuts.

Accompanying the bill was a letter from a man no one in the White House had ever heard of. Judge Pat O’Rourke — who was not actually a courtroom judge but the chief executive of El Paso County — warned that Thomason General was in danger of bankruptcy due to illegal immigrants coming from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for medical treatment. Required by law to treat the indigent, regardless of their citizenship status, the hospital was losing money caring for patients from whom it could not collect payment.

By Holly Bailey.

Full story at Yahoo News.