![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In defense of big government
Apr. 12th, 2011 03:26 pmDear Kasich and Boehner
In all likelihood, you will never read this letter. But I am one of your constituents, a person you claim to represent.
I wanted to tell you what having the liberal's idea of big government has done for my family, because you don't seem to understand how vital it has been to my family existing like it does now.
Let's start with Medicare and Medicaid, since you seem to particularly hate those programs. Yet, it's because of those programs that my family is able to stay together at all. You see, I have a sister who was born with profound disabilities. Her brain didn't form correctly in uetero, for reasons no medical science has yet been able to identify. Parts of it simply did not grow. As a result, she has cerebral palsy, profound mental retardation, and seizure disorder. Or, to put it into layman's terms for you, she has little fine motor control, she is mentally a one-year-old-child, and she has seizures on a regular basis if not controlled by proper medication.
Currently, she's on five different medications to control her seizures and minimize the side effects of the other medications. The list of medications includes one method of birth control, a hormone shot which effectively shuts down her menstrual cycle. It's absolutely a necessary medication for her, even though she will never have sex voluntarily, because without that birth control, the hormone fluctuations from her menstrual cycle interfere with her seizure medications. Before we put her on this birth control, there would be one day a month where she would have grand mal seizures every two hours.
As for her seizure medications, well, those alone are incredibly expensive. One of her seizure meds costs over 800 dollars a month. That's one medication out of five. None of the others are quite as expensive, but none of them are cheap, either. And she's been on one form or another of anti-convulsant since she was 18 months old.
Government assistance pays for most of her medications. We certainly can't afford to pay for them, even if we paid absolutely nothing in taxes and kept all of that money to pay for my sister's medications. Government assistance also helped us pay for the three times in the past two years when my sister has been hospitalized for something that results from her disabilities. Governmental assistance pays for the programming and physical therapy my sister has received her entire life. Governmental assistance paid for the modifications we needed to make to our house in order to keep my sister living in it, things like a wheelchair ramp to get her into and out of the house, or a stairlift to transfer her between the main floor and the upstairs, which is where the only bathroom in the house can be found. Governmental assistance has paid for the variety of wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers we've used to transport my sister and to let her see the world. And, when my mother is no longer able to take care of my sister in our home, it's the government funded long-term care facilities that will be providing for my sister.
That's just one way that the big government has provided something for my family that we could not have done on our own. Without governmental assistance, we could not have taken care of my sister. We would have had to send her to a state-run care facility to take care of her, instead of having her home with family, able to participate in the community. And the state would have ended up paying even more, taking care of her with the kind of 24-hour supervision she absolutely requires. If there had been no government assistance, and no state-run medical facilities? I don't know what would have happened to my sister. I don't think she'd have lived to be the age she is now. Because we would have been absolutely unable to provide for her without outside help.
That's not the only thing big government has given in the way of direct assistance to my family. When my parents had all of us children, my father was in grad school, living on grants, student loans, and the tiny salary he received as a TA bringing in about $500 a month, and my mother was running an in-home day care with about eight children, four of them her own, and also bringing in about $500. They were also on food stamps, to pay to feed all of us. Governmental assistance kept all of us fed when even both of my parents working wasn't enough to pay for everything.
My father now works for an environmental consulting company. They go to various different sites, preform assessments on the surrounding ground and landwater to make sure that a company hasn't caused too much pollution, and help them clean up contaminated areas up to EPA standards. Their first contract? Was cleaning up the government's Miamisburg Mound compound, after decades of military R&D being preformed on site. He has a job because of government regulations. Moreover, this generation's children will live in a less-polluted area if the government regulations are enforced and my father's company does its job well.
And he's not the only one I care about who earns their living from the government. One of my closest friends in high school has her dream job now, working for a company that contracts with NASA and the space program. She wants to get people to Mars, and she has a decent chance of it, as long as the government continues to provide for the space program.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time elaborating on the twenty thousand other things that the government provides for everyone, like safe drinking water, testing and regulations to make sure that food and drugs are safe, maintained streets and highways, clearing snow in winter, public schools, government backed loans to get through college, et cetera. Those are things that everyone needs and uses. What I've listed are just the specific ways in which the government has come through and helped my family. Ways we couldn't have done on our own, even if we had just kept all the money we pay in taxes. And yes, if it matters, everyone in this family who can, does work. And we've all paid taxes on it.
I needed the government, and it was there for me. I don't want to take that government away from the next family that needs it.
In all likelihood, you will never read this letter. But I am one of your constituents, a person you claim to represent.
I wanted to tell you what having the liberal's idea of big government has done for my family, because you don't seem to understand how vital it has been to my family existing like it does now.
Let's start with Medicare and Medicaid, since you seem to particularly hate those programs. Yet, it's because of those programs that my family is able to stay together at all. You see, I have a sister who was born with profound disabilities. Her brain didn't form correctly in uetero, for reasons no medical science has yet been able to identify. Parts of it simply did not grow. As a result, she has cerebral palsy, profound mental retardation, and seizure disorder. Or, to put it into layman's terms for you, she has little fine motor control, she is mentally a one-year-old-child, and she has seizures on a regular basis if not controlled by proper medication.
Currently, she's on five different medications to control her seizures and minimize the side effects of the other medications. The list of medications includes one method of birth control, a hormone shot which effectively shuts down her menstrual cycle. It's absolutely a necessary medication for her, even though she will never have sex voluntarily, because without that birth control, the hormone fluctuations from her menstrual cycle interfere with her seizure medications. Before we put her on this birth control, there would be one day a month where she would have grand mal seizures every two hours.
As for her seizure medications, well, those alone are incredibly expensive. One of her seizure meds costs over 800 dollars a month. That's one medication out of five. None of the others are quite as expensive, but none of them are cheap, either. And she's been on one form or another of anti-convulsant since she was 18 months old.
Government assistance pays for most of her medications. We certainly can't afford to pay for them, even if we paid absolutely nothing in taxes and kept all of that money to pay for my sister's medications. Government assistance also helped us pay for the three times in the past two years when my sister has been hospitalized for something that results from her disabilities. Governmental assistance pays for the programming and physical therapy my sister has received her entire life. Governmental assistance paid for the modifications we needed to make to our house in order to keep my sister living in it, things like a wheelchair ramp to get her into and out of the house, or a stairlift to transfer her between the main floor and the upstairs, which is where the only bathroom in the house can be found. Governmental assistance has paid for the variety of wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers we've used to transport my sister and to let her see the world. And, when my mother is no longer able to take care of my sister in our home, it's the government funded long-term care facilities that will be providing for my sister.
That's just one way that the big government has provided something for my family that we could not have done on our own. Without governmental assistance, we could not have taken care of my sister. We would have had to send her to a state-run care facility to take care of her, instead of having her home with family, able to participate in the community. And the state would have ended up paying even more, taking care of her with the kind of 24-hour supervision she absolutely requires. If there had been no government assistance, and no state-run medical facilities? I don't know what would have happened to my sister. I don't think she'd have lived to be the age she is now. Because we would have been absolutely unable to provide for her without outside help.
That's not the only thing big government has given in the way of direct assistance to my family. When my parents had all of us children, my father was in grad school, living on grants, student loans, and the tiny salary he received as a TA bringing in about $500 a month, and my mother was running an in-home day care with about eight children, four of them her own, and also bringing in about $500. They were also on food stamps, to pay to feed all of us. Governmental assistance kept all of us fed when even both of my parents working wasn't enough to pay for everything.
My father now works for an environmental consulting company. They go to various different sites, preform assessments on the surrounding ground and landwater to make sure that a company hasn't caused too much pollution, and help them clean up contaminated areas up to EPA standards. Their first contract? Was cleaning up the government's Miamisburg Mound compound, after decades of military R&D being preformed on site. He has a job because of government regulations. Moreover, this generation's children will live in a less-polluted area if the government regulations are enforced and my father's company does its job well.
And he's not the only one I care about who earns their living from the government. One of my closest friends in high school has her dream job now, working for a company that contracts with NASA and the space program. She wants to get people to Mars, and she has a decent chance of it, as long as the government continues to provide for the space program.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time elaborating on the twenty thousand other things that the government provides for everyone, like safe drinking water, testing and regulations to make sure that food and drugs are safe, maintained streets and highways, clearing snow in winter, public schools, government backed loans to get through college, et cetera. Those are things that everyone needs and uses. What I've listed are just the specific ways in which the government has come through and helped my family. Ways we couldn't have done on our own, even if we had just kept all the money we pay in taxes. And yes, if it matters, everyone in this family who can, does work. And we've all paid taxes on it.
I needed the government, and it was there for me. I don't want to take that government away from the next family that needs it.