Today I called my senator, here's what I said.

I'm calling to urge my senator to stop this healthcare travesty. We need real reform, not more compromise. I know that it's people like myself who end up dying and suffering over proposals like this one. For too long, necessary steps have been blocked by the vested interests who have grown rich off the labor of common, hard-working folks. At the same time these same individuals continuously promise us more than they ever deliver: in workplace safety, in food safety, in living wages, affordable housing-any housing!-yes, healthcare, or automobile safety, and on and on. More compromise in this case means more illness, more unnecessary pain and anguish, more death for people like myself. Our only offense is that we are forced by this system to work more than is needed to get less than is deserved. How can you honestly tell someone with two or three jobs that we don't deserve to have healthcare? That we are unworthy, just because we weren't born with a certain skin color or the "right background"? This, as with so many other things in our country, is a problem we are too long in finding an ethical, decent solution for. Instead we are forced to listen to more talk and excuses about "economic interests", about how "businesses can't survive", or "it's unfair to insurance companies". These entities are not alive, they don't matter when measured against the death of a mother or father whose disease was not treated in time, of one more child who goes hungry to pay the insurance, or one more brother or sister who slides into poverty under mounting medical bills. It's time to stop this insane practice of "we can't", it's time to say not only "we should", or even, "we can". It's time to say, "we will."