Tina Shannon, Chairperson of the PA 17th Congressional District Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America

I’ve been asked to talk to you about healthcare today. In the past months, we’ve all had plenty of information and facts on healthcare, as Medicaid has been threatened. So I’d like to take a different approach today. I’d like to talk to you about the politics of the situation.

You see, all this time I’ve been working with good people, and a lot of them, maybe most of them, have had faith that if we chip away incrementally at our problems, things will eventually turn out okay. And who am to say they were wrong?

I don’t know what’s gonna happen. So I got myself to believe that, to believe maybe they were right, and keep doing the work, and keep hoping that things would turn out okay. But I now find myself unable to do that. For one thing, my tax dollars are being sucked out of my community to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system, to bomb hospitals and kill doctors and nurses.

James Madison, the third President of our country said, “No country could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.” And, also in political terms regarding healthcare, all over the country, and right here in Beaver County where you live, people fought for Medicare for All. Because of that struggle, we offered the Affordable Care Act during Obama’s presidency. And even then, we had to fight to get it passed. And we did. We won that. And that was good.

I know someone who’s alive because of the ACA. She had no insurance and a wide variety of symptoms that often landed her in the emergency room. After the ACA passed, she could afford insurance and found out she had a tumor on her adrenal gland that likely would’ve killed her if she hadn’t gotten healthcare coverage to get it diagnosed.

So that’s good. But also me, under the ACA, when I was younger, in my 50s, my deductible was $15,000, and I was paying around $500 a month in premiums. So I was paying that much monthly for insurance that paid for almost nothing.

The insurance companies took over the ACA as a vehicle for their profits. And now they’re taking over Medicare too. So here we are, with less influence than ever over our government because it’s controlled by the richest 1%, from the health insurance companies to the arms manufacturers. And the general public doesn’t trust the government anymore because they can feel this, even if those feelings have been exploited and manipulated to get them to turn against each other.

As long as money extraction is the goal of our economic system and political system, we will not be able to attend to our domestic needs, and thus we will not be able to change this situation. I should know. I’ve been trying to get policy and legislation and candidates that will attend to our domestic needs my entire adult life, and trying to figure out why we’re failing.

We can’t maintain our democracy within this paradigm. I can no longer get myself to believe that everything’s gonna be okay if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.

Again, James Madison, “No country could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.” It’s time to do some different things. It’s time to have some different discussions. If you want to be part of that discussion, get with me or my friend Amber over there to get on my sign-up sheet.

If Gaza and the unending wars are your main issue, get with my friends from our local peace group over there holding up the War Is Making You Poor banner. And the biggest rock stars here today are the Young Dems. They put this event together.

Some of them are walking around with the orange marshal’s vests on. Talk to them or look them up online. If you’re old like me, you can look up Beaver County Dems online also. Find your place. Find your political home and get involved. It’s gonna take more than protests to change things.

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Tina Shannon grew up in Beaver County, Pennsylvania and has lived there most of her life. She comes from a family of Beaver County mill workers, river men, and dairy farmers. She attended both Pitt and Antioch Colleges before settling down in New Brighton to operate a family daycare business.

She first became involved in politics at Pitt, through the Campus NOW chapter. She has been involved with community improvement projects, worked on peace issues, and served on the New Brighton School Board. She works to support local and national progressive candidates for office. She serves on the board of Beaver County Peace Links and serves as Chairperson of the PA 17th Congressional District Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America.