This is heartbreaking. Health care is a human right.
"This is the final photo of my son, taken six weeks before he died. I hate to even look at it, but there it is. He weighed about 104 -- and he would lose another 15 or so pounds before he finally starved to death.
"I wasn't even going to save the photo because I prefer to remember my son as a healthy, funny, hyperactive clown. But this is what I live with now -- the memory of a gaunt, pain-wracked young man.
"If Mike had been able to get the colonoscopies he needed, he would still be the person I want to remember.
"Instead, we as a society refuse to extend care to all human beings, and 17,000 people die each year in states that have refused to expand Medicaid to cover people in poverty. In North Carolina alone, that number is 2,800. That's seven people a day. Seven human beings who were loved by their family and friends, just as my son was.
"I helped organize a die-in this last week in Raleigh, and the eulogist, Rev. Dr. William Barber II, suggested we have open-casket funerals for the people who die from lack of care so people can see the result of our state's politicians' uncaring attitude toward the lives of the people they are supposed to be serving.
"When Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, his mother decided on an open-casket funeral so people could see what had been done to her boy. Well, this is what was done to mine.
"These legislators who refuse to expand Medicaid call themselves pro-life, but their policies prove otherwise. They care nothing for life once it has exited the birth canal. They care only about scoring political points, and as the body count mounts, they suffer no consequences for the lives they allow to be snuffed out."
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