When we were young: 54/100
20 September, 2016 | Index
Dear Hillary Clinton,
Gerard Mclean here, from Englewood, Ohio, just north of Dayton. This is the fifty-fourth letter of one hundred I am writing you on health care; one for each day between your nomination and your election. The others can be found in your USPS mailbox or online at 100HRC.com
I get asked a lot by people who read these letters or I tell them about it, “Why do you do that? It’s a waste of time. You should protest instead.” My reply; “Each of us fights the threat to our Democracy with the weapons we have. I can write.”
That is how I fight. The medical health care insurance corporations are a fundamental threat to our Democracy.
When we were young, we each set off to make a difference, to change the world, to leave a mark and before long we end up ensnared by the traps life sets out for us, like mortgages, student loan debt, health care insurance premiums, medical debt. These are the things corporations have designed to turn us into cash machines for them, to break our spirit, to cause us to despair.
Churn through one generation, repeat for the next. There’s always another more hopeful generation coming up for corporations to exploit.
Few expenses trap us like health insurance. We want to be free from not dying of preventable diseases, to be able to repair our bodies when accidents happen. The health insurance corporations feed off our fears and with the aid of and in concert with the most feared enforcement arm of our government, they suck out not only the cash from our wallets but the spirit from our souls. In the end, we are left without passion, merely acting to minimize pain instead of creating the best selves we can.
SinglePayer, MedicareForAll, UniversalCare frees us of the crushing and unrelenting stress of unattainable monthly premiums and exorbitant annual deductibles and gives us the freedom to contribute our full talents toward life, which in turn makes America stronger.
Regards,
Gerard McLean
cc: Sen. Sherrod Brown
