Before I ask you to make a $10 donation ahead of our urgent FEC fundraising deadline in 48 hours, can I tell you a story about why I’m running for the U.S. Senate in Mississippi?
I’m from Yazoo City, Mississippi, a rural town of about 17,000 people in the Mississippi Delta. My twin sister, Michelle, and I were born at the Afro-American Sons and Daughters Hospital — the first Black hospital in Mississippi that my grandfather founded in 1924.
We were fortunate to have this hospital. Until it was built, Black women in Mississippi had been giving birth in the fields or in sharecropper shacks.
Unfortunately, Afro-American Sons and Daughters was also a rural hospital during Jim Crow — meaning it was segregated. It didn’t have a lot of money for equipment. Plus, back in those days, there was no ambulance service, and no EMT service, in a Black neighborhood. There was nobody you could call during a health emergency.
I was only five-years-old — maybe six — when I almost died from an asthma attack. I was born with chronic asthma, and one day I had an asthma attack so severe, that I began to become comatose. I mean SEVERE. I could not breathe.
The last thing I recall is my mama crying out for help. The story is told that my father picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and rushed me down the street to the hospital that my grandfather built.
But, when we got there, there was no oxygen. The hospital had run out of oxygen.
By now, they tell me my extremities became blue, from my lips to my fingers. Then I stopped breathing. There were some nurses there who joined hands around my bedside and prayed for me, as if they were administering last rites.
So my father went to the white hospital. It was called King's Daughters, and it was about three blocks away. My father begged them for an available canister of oxygen for his dying son. And the white nurses there gave it to him — against the social rules of the time.
He rushed back to Afro-American Sons and Daughters. They hooked me up to that oxygen. And now I'm here writing this email to you today.
That was 60 years ago. Mississippi has made a lot of progress since then, but we still face a health care crisis. Protections for people with pre-existing conditions, like asthma, are at risk like never before. Hardworking people are getting crushed by the rising cost of premiums, copays, and prescription drugs.
And our rural hospitals are STILL underserved. Five rural hospitals have closed in the past decade. FIVE! Last year, a young Mississippi woman died because of an asthma attack — the same thing that almost killed me — after her rural hospital’s E.R. closed.
That’s why my absolute, number-one priority in the Senate is health care. No one should die from an asthma attack in 2020. I am sick of Mississippi coming in last for health care outcomes and having least. So I am running for the U.S. Senate.
Please, help me end Mississippi’s health care crisis once and for all by sending me to the U.S. Senate. Will you donate $10 before our end-of-quarter fundraising deadline in 48 hours? This is our single-most important fundraising deadline yet, and anything you are able to give has a direct and immediate impact during these critical last five weeks.
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I will go to Washington and do everything I can to expand Medicaid here in Mississippi. I will be a strong defender of the Affordable Care Act. I will do everything in my power to ensure affordable, quality health care access for Mississippians.
And I will be the very best Health Care Senator that you have ever seen.
Thanks for all you do.
— Mike
