There is a lot of demand for Hillary Clinton supporters to prove why they are voting for Hillary Clinton in the primary and why they support her. I’ll start with my main one that “had me with hello.”
www.cnn.com/…
The federal government spent $2 million on the Lifespan Respite Care program in 2015, and Obama asked for $5 million for the program in 2016. Clinton's proposal would increase that spending to $10 million a year.
My mother started showing signs of dementia in 2011. For a while I was in denial about it. This obviously intelligent woman couldn’t be losing her memory. This was just a normal sign of aging, certainly. With medical care being so expensive, and with her losing her ability to provide an income (she was a freelance writer) I did what I had to do to try to help her memory, using vitamins, puzzles and so on.
At length she turned 66, so I signed her up for Social Security and Medicare, which helped some. Because she didn’t have an income anymore, someone else helped me get her on Medicaid. Her situation became worse. She told me at one point that she needed to move to California and she thought she would get better then. I was fine with leaving Washington State and so I did.
To make this long story short, she didn’t get better. I was lucky in that my brother helped me with expenses, but it didn’t stop the fact that I couldn’t afford to have anyone care for her. I had to take a lot of time off work, and I was temping at the time, so I couldn’t take advantage of the Family Medical Care Leave act. I was literally flailing trying to find out what was wrong with her. It seemed doctors didn’t know (and in some cases, didn’t care). We got her an MRI and I never did find out the results. She went to the emergency room often. When she was at home, I would spend hours terrified that she would hurt herself, but no one seemed to listen. Finally a pair of social workers saw me in my intense, agitated state and helped get Mom into a nursing facility, where she passed away six months later. Nine months later I’m still shaken about what I could have done, and what I could do.
Caregivers are the ignored. We’re expected to pull up our bootstraps and just help our elders, despite the fact that we have to earn a living and keep a roof over both of our heads. So many times you ask for help, and you’re handed a brochure for something that bureaucracy tells you you’re not eligible for. When I saw Hillary Clinton address the needs of caregivers to keep their own well-being in check while desperately ensuring their loved ones are safe and cared for, all the “oligarch” and “corporatist” and “evil demon” stuff would never penetrate my head again.
See, caregivers are not even on the political radar. They could go on being ignored. To even think that a caregiver would have needs is often thought of as selfish. Nothing could be further from the truth. Caregivers need to be helped and provided for so that they can be strong and able to be there for their loved ones. A caregiver who can’t stand on his own two feet because he’s worried about two people’s next meals is ineffective.
Thus, someone whose only vested interest is in Wall Street would not even begin to address this issue. There’s no reason for her to increase Obama’s projected support. She could just advocate for the issue and put it to bed. But the fact that she knows caregivers need more… there is a powerful humanity in such a person.
I like Bernie Sanders. I think he’s a fine man with fine ideas, and I hope that no matter what, after 2016, he continues advocating for those ideas and bringing them to the table. But they’re intellectual ideas. Hillary Clinton, to me, has shown that she can address the individual’s pain and suffering while still being there “when the phone rings at 2 AM.”