Or "Why it’s ‘personal’ for me, too, John"
With every passing weeknight, it gets harder and harder to watch Hardball. In fact, it was playing in the background as I drafted this diary. I’ve become particularly annoyed by Matthews’ Wednesday night segment, "The Big Number". So, imagine my surprise when last night’s big number was "7" and it was related to John Edwards! Could it be?
Now, I’m not a particularly superstitious person but I’m going to have to revisit that belief (or lack thereof). The Edwards supporters here at The Daily Kos have embarked on the daunting task of setting a new single-day fundraisingtally for John Edwards, eclipsing the single day record of $6M currently held by Ron Paul. What’s our magic number? 7...that is, $7Million.
If you can, please donate what you can on Friday, January 18, to help us raise $7Million for John Edwards. You can click here to be taken to the campaign donation page.
Why the number 7 is "personal" for both John Edwards and me, after the jump.
To get to the "big number", you’ll have to have some patience. The MSNBC "Big Number 7" clip is about 3:30 minutes long. Before we get to the big number, we have to endure the Michigan "Dewey" snafu (McCain beats Romney...oops). Then: 38 seconds in, we get "Vietnam Vets Against McCain". Is it time for the big number now? Nope. At the 1:18 mark, we get Bush in Israel being serenaded with "Over the Rainbow" in Hebrew (WTF? Did "Tweety" really just say "This is a great way to learn Hebrew"?). More Bush drivel follows at the 1:48 mark...Bush’s magical fur-lined robe (where’s a PETA member with a bucket of red paint when you need ‘em?). Surely, at the 2:01 mark we’re finally going to learn the significance of the number 7 as it relates to John Edwards, right? Not so fast. Before we get to the big number we have to suffer through Huckabee’s description of frying squirrels in a popcorn popper in the dorm (PETA people, why can’t you do something about all this animal abuse at Hardball?!?).
Hardball’s Big Number: 7
Finally. With slightly over a minute left, we get to the big number: 7. Seems that in a 2-hour debate, John Edwards used the word personal seven times! The nerve! The unmitigated gall! How dare John Edwards frame his race for the Presidency as personal? Well, because it is personal for both John and Elizabeth Edwards. One of my favorite lines from the campaign is "this is the cause of my life". That’s the kind of man I want working for me. To think that John Edwards takes personally whether or not I have adequate healthcare...and that’s why my support of Edwards is personal.
John Edwards believes that HIV/AIDS care and treatment shouldn’t be dependent on private funding. As we can see in the All American Presidential Forums YouTube video, Edwards wants to:
1.Fully fund a cure
2.Fully fund the Ryan White Act which would make treatment available for all diagnosed with HIV/AIDS
3.Ensure that Medicaid covers AIDS drugs and treatment, especially for people with low income
HIV/AIDS is no longer "the gay plague" in America. HIV/AIDS has a disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos.
John Edwards has a domestic HIV/AIDS Plan:
As president, Edwards will develop a National HIV/AIDS Strategy through an honest, comprehensive and fast-tracked process that involves stakeholders from the public and nonprofit sectors. The National Strategy will coordinate the various agencies within and outside of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that affect HIV/AIDS policy. He will hold his HHS Secretary accountable for issuing an annual report on HIV/AIDS that charts progress towards our national goals, and he will appoint a strong director of the White House office of AIDS Policy to keep these issues visible at the highest levels of government. [CDC, 1999, 2001, 2007; HHS, 1998]
and
About two-thirds of all new HIV/AIDS cases are diagnosed in African Americans and Latinos. African Americans are infected at nearly 10 times the rate, and Latinos at more than three times the rate, of white Americans. A 2005 study of African-American men who have sex with men in selected cities found that almost half are infected with HIV, and 67 percent do not know they have the disease. Latina women are six times more likely than white women to have HIV/AIDS. Any serious effort to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic must begin in the African-American and Latino communities, including among the incarcerated population, and address their prevention and treatment needs. We must also continue to work intensively with important overlapping groups like gay men. [CDC, 2007; KFF, 2007]
John Edwards Answers a Question from the ONECampaign:
See? John really "gets it". Like so many other issues, there is a correlation between poverty and HIV/AIDS infection rates.
Health care is personal for me because both my partner and I have AIDS.
I was diagnosed with AIDS on Valentine’s Day, 1996. Every year, I get a wry sensation of the irony of my "special anniversary". I had wasted all the way down to about 115 pounds. My initial t-cell count came back zero. We re-ran the test and found 2 t-cells. My doctor at the time was a very compassionate, but pragmatic man. After asking the inevitable, "how long", he sat me down and gave me a month...tops. After talking with my partner over the weekend, I went to work on a snowy Monday and told the Vice-President of my division the bad news and that I would need to take disability as soon as possible.
At the time of my diagnosis, my partner and I had a beautiful home in an exclusive "equestrian estates" neighborhood.
He insisted on putting the place on the market and moving back to Texas to be close to my family. We did. We bought a wonderful 50-acre horse farm a few hours from my hometown. I started responding slowly to "the cocktail". I started putting on weight, little-by-little. In August of 2000, my partner suffered from a heat stroke. When we got him to the doctor, he insisted that he take an HIV-test (assuming that because I had AIDS, that my partner must have "it", too). Positive.
As my health got progressively better (which is a relative term), my partner’s deteriorated. Neither of us was able to work, but that didn’t mean that our bills would just go away. I viaticated (sold, for nickels on the dollar) my life insurance policy which bought us a few month’s time. Ultimately, we couldn’t keep the collector’s at bay any longer. One day before we were to go into foreclosure, we sold our 5000 square foot house and 18 of our 50 acres. We were blessed that it paid off the mortgage on the remaining real estate. We moved into the "caretaker’s" mobile home (which had been unoccupied, except for squirrels) since we bought the farm. It was old and in disrepair, but we weren’t homeless. Between my SSI and disability insurance and his Social Security Disability, we were able to just make ends meet. I qualified for Medicare and he qualified for Medicaid. We were two people who had gone from a very upper-middle class existence to being virtually destitute.
Last year, my partner turned 63. The law is that if you are "disabled" and turn 63, you have no choice but to take Social (in)Security’s "early retirement". His "income" almost doubled (all the way up to $900/month)! As a result, his income was too high for Medicaid. It wasn’t low enough for Medicare. The end result: our country’s health care system forced him into a "drug holiday". The only prescriptions he can afford are those on Walmart’s $4 generic list. That list doesn’t include any HIV/AIDS drugs.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we are doing all we can to keep him alive until he turns 65.
Healthcare. For me, it couldn’t be more personal.
Thank you, John Edwards, for being the only candidate that could actually have some impact on my partner’s survival.