This is Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, steering committee member of the Save America Movement.

Our newest ad lays out what’s at stake in this shutdown fight: the human cost of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and the budget that followed it. Strip away the talking points and it’s simple: either we protect people’s health care or we accept policies that will cost lives.

Corporate media keeps framing the shutdown as a failure of communication between two equal sides. But that’s not the story the people we pray with every week are living. A budget is a moral vision in numbers. And right now, one side is fighting to protect health care while the other wrote a plan that slashes it to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and corporations.

The human math is brutal:

24 million low-income Americans are receiving letters about steep premium hikes.
Dozens of rural hospitals will close next year.
Up to 16 million people could lose coverage.

Researchers at Yale and Penn estimate 51,000 preventable deaths next year alone if these cuts and expirations go through.

Before this fight, we already accepted a slow-moving emergency: 800 people die from poverty every day in America. We called 500 COVID deaths per day an epidemic—yet we’ve treated poverty deaths as normal. That is a moral failure.

All summer, faith leaders and impacted families stood in the rain outside Senate offices across the South. We carried caskets to symbolize the true price of cutting care. We asked Senators to meet people who will lose coverage and to pray with us for a way forward. Too many refused. But we didn’t show up to perform despair. We showed up to tell the truth—and to remind this nation of who we are at our best.

Our ad names the choice: Will we choose life, or normalize policy decisions that take it? The Trump tax bill set the table for this shutdown and for the “savings” some leaders now demand at our neighbors’ expense. The Save America Movement is answering with moral clarity and action—on the air, in the streets, and in the halls of power.

If you believe health care is a moral issue, I’m asking you to stand with us today.

Chip in $25, $50, or whatever you can to help our partner organization, Repairers of the Breach, continue the important work organizing communities in the challenging times.

Let’s choose life—together.

In hope and resolve,
Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Steering Committee Member, Save America Movement