- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
Yesterday my husband and I decided to send an email to our friends and family exlaining why we support Barack Obama. I thought I would share it with you too:
As you know, we have been ardently advocating for Barack Obama to win the presidential election on November 4th. This campaign has been so divisive and polarizing, that we thought rather than focusing on the negativity, we’d go back to the issues and share with you our reasons behind our support for Obama. We have both done a tremendous amount of reading, listening, watching, thinking and debating to bring us to these opinions and hope that you will find that what we say is based on research and not on lofty ideals. Here goes:
Health Care
You probably know that health care is vitally important to us as Tracy was diagnosed with cancer last year, so we have spent a great deal of time researching this issue. The biggest reason we believe in Barack Obama on the health care issue is that he gets it. His mother had to fight with insurance companies in the last months of her battle against cancer, because they didn’t want to pay for her “pre-existing condition.” Obama understands the frustrations and fears we all have for dealing with a capitalistic health care system that forgets about the people it is meant to serve. He is not for universal, socialistic health care as many claim. His plan is to improve the quality of the industry, make our records electronic to reduce errors, and provide health care insurance to the 47 million Americans who are currently without it. If you have insurance and doctors that you like – he says, great – keep them. But if you don’t have a means to health care insurance, he wants to expand the federal system that congressmen and federal employees use (or something like it) for those in need. The state of Massachusetts has a similar model that has been extremely successful, despite some obvious growing pains. We see no benefit to McCain’s plan, and in fact the U.S. Chamber of Congress agrees. He proposes a $5,000 tax credit per family to buy our own health care and not have to get it through our jobs. Not tying health care to jobs is a wonderful idea, but his approach fails. The average family has about $12,000 a year in health care bills mostly paid by their companies and through tax breaks. With McCain’s plan we not only lose money, but by deregulating the industry, we run the risk of coverage problems due to pre-existing conditions.
Women’s Issues
Right now activists in South Dakota are teeing up the issue of abortion so that if John McCain is elected, he can appoint a conservative justice to replace one of the close to retirement liberals on the bench and overturn Roe v. Wade. We always hear comments like “this will never happen” or “even if it does who cares – we’ll never go back to pre-1970s where women were dying from trying to give themselves abortions because the medical community wouldn’t help them.” They are wrong. In South Dakota, for example, there is one facility in the entire state that currently provides abortions. Planned Parenthood flies doctors in from other states, because the doctors in South Dakota are afraid of what would happen to them if they did the procedures. Women with at-risk pregnancies are terrified to talk to their doctors about them, because of the persecution they might face. One doctor spoke in an interview about a woman who drove for hours to get to the clinic and came in very ill – the apparatus she used to attempt to terminate her own pregnancy broke off inside her. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the decision to keep abortions would be left up to each individual state, and most states are more in line with South Dakota than you think. We are one vote away, and the appeals to keep the restrictive amendment alive in South Dakota have now been supported by a federal appellate court (filled with right-wing, ideologue judges appointed by George W. Bush). This issue is on a straight path to the Supreme Court.
In terms of women’s issues in general, we have to speak negatively about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin—there’s no other way to present this point. To present a woman who clearly has no substantive knowledge or experience to the American people as a viable candidate