Donna Smith, American SiCKO gave a rousing speech to over 1000 people at the National Health Care For the Homeless Conference today in Phoenix.
For those of you who have seen Michael Moore’s movie, SiCKO, you know that my husband and I lost our home in South Dakota after suffering through years of healthcare related financial trauma and finding no way to hang on.
We are filmed moving into our daughter’s small storage room or computer room or spare office or whatever you’d like to term it. And you see our youngest son confronting us about our situation. He asks us: "What Do We Do With People Like You?"
The words seered my heart and my soul then and they still do now as I recall the fight to maintain what little dignity we had left at that point. You see the moments you see on the screen came only after many years of fighting and falling and fighting and crawling our way back again.
Moving in with our daughter wasn’t our only homeless moment over the past 20 years of healthcare struggle, we had lived in a motel for a while after one of my husband’s surgeries, in a double-wide trailer house that we actually fought to keep as our last vestige of home owning freedom, and when we finally gave up the home you see in SiCKO, it was the deepest and darkest instant of that struggle when I heard the baby boy I brought into this world, the young man who I protected and loved and honored with my life’s work ask me, "What do we do with people like you?"
The complete text of her incredible speech is available here