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“She never minded the loss of the meal option; it was the lack of a visit she dreaded.”

Meals on Wheels and The Dismantling of America

Lezlie King, Guest Commentator

It appears the GOP began their dismantling of the fabric of America by going after our senior citizens first. The proposed budget cuts that would severely cripple Meals on Wheels felt like a personal attack on my family.

In the last several years of my mom’s life—as she battled through numerous strokes and diabetes related maladies and eventually cancer—she was subsisting each month on my step-father’s VA pension check of $300 and her Social Security check of $450. Her rent ate up the first $600 for a little apartment in the poorest part of the town where she lived. Nothing fancy or extravagant, just a small box of an apartment. I no longer remember what her utilities cost. She received about $80 a month in food stamps. While she also had Medicare and Medicaid, many of her medical expenses and prescriptions were either out of pocket or came with a hefty co-pay.

MEALS ON WHEELS 2nd BIRTHDAY 4TH JULY 1966. F Smally, J Bulloch, A Bradshaw, S Croft Seated: The Founder of MOW SA Inc., Miss Doris Taylor

There came a point after one of the strokes that mom’s vision was so impaired she was no longer able to drive. That’s when she began to receive Meals on Wheels. Beyond the biggest factor of having meals provided, the people who delivered them became a source of outside contact with the world that she no longer had. The volunteers would spend time visiting with her when they brought the meals, and became her friends.

Mom looked forward to those visits. When bad weather was forecast, the volunteers would bring her regular hot meal plus a cold one in case the roads became impassable. She never minded the loss of the meal option; it was the lack of a visit she dreaded.

Meals on Wheels does so much more than their name implies. My mom once had a very broad social circle. As she aged it dwindled, until the loss of human interaction was as debilitating as the diseases she battled. The program was a lifeline on many levels.

Now Congress is moving on to healthcare. In the name of curbing abuses of the system they will be irreparably damaging those who are the least able among us. While it is all well and good for some of these senators and our vice president to proclaim that cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will only force people to ‘take personal responsibility’ where does it leave those who cannot? What about medically fragile who cannot support themselves?

My friend, Julie, has full guardianship of her granddaughter. Brianna, now ten, was born with a glioneuronal brain tumor, and has since developed cerebral palsy along with several other conditions. Her medical care is expensive.

The costs include her monthly supplies (that keep her fed and breathing), monthly medicine (that keeps her alive), and nursing (that keeps her safe and allows her grandparents to work full-time jobs) which run about $20,000 a month. Then there are the added yearly costs of 12-15 specialists, 7-10 pediatrician visits, an average of 6-12 days of hospital stays, and three-times-a-week therapy visits for an estimated $500,000. That is half a million dollars per year to take care of this sweet little girl. With a fixed per capita cap replacing Medicaid under the new GOP proposal, how is Julie supposed to afford these costs on her teacher’s salary? Where should she make cuts?

I have heard so many loudly justify their voting preferences based on the ‘life’ of an as-yet unsustainable zygote or fetus. How do they reconcile that with killing a living, breathing Brianna? How do they justify the slow, painful deaths of our senior citizens from starvation and neglect? I’m not okay with that. How does a person rationalize that in their heart and mind? How can anyone be okay with that?

Lezlie K. King is an author and artist, the owner of Lezlie King Designs. Her past credits include Cruising Strangers, book one in The Maisie Mae Marsh Mysteries Series and The Freak Show Case, book one in the Pegasus Mysteries, co-authored with Brian D. Eyre.

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