John,
Our campaign has been working hard at making inroads to the community of PA-03 over these past few months. Working at a cancer center when the pandemic first struck, I saw how isolated our older patients were and found myself having drawn out conversations just to give them some extra company before they went into their appointments. However, on the campaign trail, I’ve quickly learned that that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Here are some of the stories of aging adults in PA-03:
Marian, aged 85, answered the door on a frigid day. She had struggled down the stairs to answer the door, lived by herself, and had been upstairs in her office trying to find her mortgage papers. Her grandson had robbed her of some of her possessions including her mortgage papers and she was at a loss of what to do. She knew she needed to move to assisted living and she knew she needed a driver to her doctors’ appointments, but she didn’t know how to navigate our electronic systems to get this help. Marian also didn’t have a working phone and kept asking if she needed to go get a job to help pay her bills. (After meeting Marian, I placed a call to Philadelphia’s Department of Aging for suspected elder abuse.)
Lisa, aged 62, asked if I would like to come in and sit down in her living room where she had been reading a book. She told me she had been praying for Build Back Better and its Medicare expansion because she had advanced cancer and her current health insurance didn’t cover her life-sustaining therapy or prescription drug costs. She shared that even if she survived this fight for her life, she wouldn’t be able to afford much on the other end of this battle. She was still trying to work to pay her bills, but was having difficulty keeping a job due to being sick and needing treatment.
Paul, aged 73, was carrying his week’s worth of food from the senior citizen center up the street when I offered to carry his groceries if he wouldn’t mind signing my petition. He said that he had tried to contact our current representative for help finding his Social Security checks, but his phone calls and emails went unanswered. He wanted to make sure I knew how long the lines were at the senior citizen center every single week, how hard it is to cook and prepare food with arthritic hands, and if I would promise to help him and others like him with Social Security before he would sign my petition.
I promised Paul, he signed my petition, and I mean to keep my promise.
As an EMT, the biggest grievance that could end your career and strip you of your certification is neglect – the failure to provide care within your scope of practice. Aging adults in Philly are hanging by a thread and the rampant neglect they are facing should unseat every elected official who is looking the other way and doing nothing about it. The village that is supposed to be raising our children should be there for our elders too, especially after their decades of service to this country. This real, palpable pain of older adults in our district is what keeps me pressing forward urgently on this campaign trail.
John, will you make a contribution today to help our campaign keep our promise to Paul that we'll fight to increase social security, pass universal healthcare, and provide more and better public resources to our aging populations?
