--said by Winston Churchill, rallying the British people to resist German invasion in September 1940. Fortunately, the British people and the world were spared that horrific invasion and the bloodbath that would have followed, as the heroic "few" of the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain. Why am I quoting this particular phrase from Churchill? Please follow below past the orange thingy for an explanation.
Today I got my hair cut by the woman who has been cutting my wife's hair and mine for over twenty years. Suzy, I'll call her though it is not her name, lives out in Winchester deep in farm country Virginia. Running her own small business has been a never-ending struggle , but Suzy has always volunteered to help save abandoned cats and dogs, giving freely of time and money to the cause (even though she has too little of either). So we make the drive out to Leesburg once a month.
Today, as I was paying, I asked Suzy if she had gone on the health insurance exchange. She twisted her face into a frown, shook her head, and said, "I heard it was crashing." But I know her well enough to know that she was really dismissing the idea out of hand. So I said, "Yes, they are still having problems, but now they have an 800 number so you can call on the phone." Suzy's eyes lit up, as she has only begun using a computer in the last few years but a phone call is a different animal. (personally I have an irrational fear of telephones, so the more stuff I can do online the better)
I went on to tell how, although I didn't need to buy the insurance, as I have retiree insurance, I went on the site out of curiosity. I told her that now you can browse prices and plans without actually signing up, and that even the sticker price was pretty good. Another woman in the shop chimed in that you can get subsidies if your income is low enough. I agreed and sort of phrased it as getting a discount off of list price as long as your income is under $46,000 (Suzy is single with no children). "What is the website?" she asked. "Healthcare.gov", I replied, and the other woman added, "And don't be fooled. There is healthcare.com, and that's something totally different. Make sure you do .gov" Suzy wrote the information down. I am hoping that when I see her next month, she will tell me that she has gone on the website and found insurance that she can afford, because I know she has never been able to afford it up till now.
What does this have to do with the Churchill quote? Well, there are hundreds of thousands of us on Daily Kos. All of us are busy, of course. But if each of us tries to reach just one person who is uninsured---no pressure, no hard sell, just personal testimony--that would bring in an enormous number of people to at least look for themselves. And the more people that look, the more people that will buy. The more people that buy, the better the system will work (financially) and the more ridiculous Republican objections will seem. We can't change everything that needs changing in America by ourselves--but we can always take one person with us into a brighter future.