John,

I used to work as an EMT and I struggled in every shift.

I was quite good at medicine and worked well under pressure, but I struggled with not knowing the outcome of our patients’ visits to the hospital.

One day during this pandemic, I was at a dog park with my dogs and heard a child crying. A deep, maternal instinct within me understood that the cries grating against my ears were coming from a child who was badly hurt.

I followed the cries and found a little boy with his mother on a ramp. He had lost control of his scooter and had gone head first into a metal pole. He was wearing a helmet. His mother looked at me with eyes of desperation, she had done everything right, she took her son out for fresh air after school, provided him with a scooter for entertainment, and made sure he had a helmet on his head for safety. Yet he was sitting on the ground screaming in pain with a massive lump ballooning on his head.

I asked her if she wanted me to call an ambulance and she nodded shakily. The ambulance wouldn’t be able to see us from the street and I told her I would go meet them, but she grabbed my arm. She was terrified and didn’t want to be alone. I sat on the ground and held them both, asking the little boy questions about the accident, his school day, the name of his cat, anything to keep him talking. But as the lump on his head grew, his eyes turned glassy and he fell silent. He couldn’t remember what had happened to him anymore.

I could tell the urgency of a call simply by how EMTs moved. If it was a fall, they moved casually, strolling towards the truck, stopping to tell a joke. When a call came in with “CPR in progress,” it was a breathless scramble of boots hitting the ground and racing to the truck. When the EMTs got to us sitting in this park, they took one look at the little boy, picked him up, and ran. That was the image I was left with – the EMTs sprinting towards their truck with the stone-faced little boy and his mother scrambling after them.

What happens next?

That little boy was going to need a ton of life-saving interventions. Those interventions are costly. How would his mother pay for those interventions? What could his family potentially have to lose or give up to avoid being crushed by medical bills? Did he have health insurance that would cover such an emergent call? I have no idea what happened next for that little boy, but I understood that live or die, there wasn’t a happily ever after waiting for him.

The United States built a healthcare system that puts profits over people. It should not take that much courage to transform it. Yet, the incumbent in Pennsylvania’s 3rd district, whom I’m challenging in the 2022 primary, has not backed Rep. Jayapal’s Medicare for All—the only universal healthcare bill in Congress. Moreover, he has been taking campaign contributions from private health insurance companies and big pharma, ensuring the unethical and inhumane status quo continues.

Help our campaign succeed, so nobody has to make a choice about their healthcare based on what’s in their wallet. Can you contribute $25, $50, or anything you can today to unseat the do-nothing incumbent and pass Medicare for All?

For Medicare for All,

Alexandra Hunt