A True Health Care Summit Story

Dear Mr. Obama, My name is Cardenio Dolores. I come from the small province of La Guaira, in the great country of Venezuela. As I watched the Health Care summit, I could not help but think of a very good friend of mine named Pedro. (By the way Mr. President, you are a great moderator) Pedro was a very good man. He was a member of the Cretinos tribe in a remote village that borders the Amazon River. The Cretinos is a very noble tribe of indigenous people, with slightly discolored skin, approaching a mixture of blue and magenta, much like the Navis in the movie Avatar, which is credited with discovering Helium. This tribe has long since been destroyed by a band of CIA mercenaries. My friend Pedro was the only one to escape the massacre, and was soon after drafted into the Venezuelan army, despite what many in that country viewed as a rather peculiar skin anomaly. In reality Pedro had no choice, since evil Americans had come to our country to destroy his village, killing every one of his last remaining relatives from what is now an extinct race. When my friend Pedro returned from combat, he had one remaining leg, which was propped up by a very rudimentary prosthetic unit made out of sugar cane. He had also lost sight from his left eye and bore many other scars in his body which I care not to mention. Additionally, he lost all of his teeth in a grenade explosion, and had to wear dentures. Thanks to President Hugo Chaves’ No Sick People (N.S.P) Universal Health Care initiative in Venezuela, Pedro was able to afford the latest available wooden dentures in the market at the time. A few years later my friend Pedro came to this great country. I met him while he was working a Toyota manufacturing company in Detroit. He was a very able worker despite his many handicaps. A few months later, Pedro became unemployed, after the automobile company closed down because a problem with breaks or something. Pedro was then forced to make a living as a telemarketer for an absorbent towels sales company in Tucson, Arizona. Not long after that stint, Pedro was laid off again. Then hurricane Katrina hit. Although the hurricane did not obviously affect his area, Pedro was so distressed by the fact that Global Warming was causing so many problems around the globe, and that the government was doing so little to prevent these disasters, that he fell into a deep depression. Needless to say, Pedro could not afford anti-depressants or the medical marihuana he needed so much during this time of distress on the rather meager stipend he was receiving from the government. It was during this time that he discovered that his Father, a prominent member of the Cretino tribe back in Venezuela, was still alive, and that reports of his death had actually been fabricated in order for government officials to grant him a visa that would allow him to travel to the U.S.A. With the little money that he could gather, Pedro was able to book a flight for his father to come and join him in America, but that plane ended in a terrible crash, as some Yemen terrorists had slipped into the plane’s baggage compartment unnoticed and flown it straight into what they thought was the White House, but was actually a large farm house in Chilton County, Alabama. Pedro’s depression intensified at the news of his father’s death, and eventually he found himself homeless. A few months later I met Pedro at a homeless shelter in the city of Chicago. It wasn’t long before his health fully deteriorated and I had to bring him home to die, as we could not gain entrance into the emergency room at the local hospital, because of heartless insurance companies that had denied Pedro catastrophic coverage. I remember Pedro’s last words, as I sat by his death bed: please make sure Obama Care passes. I do not want anybody to go through what I have had to go through and not have free health care. Minutes before my toothless, half-blind, one-legged, blue, orphaned friend passed into eternity, he bequeathed to me his last possessions on earth: His Father’s wooden dentures and the last vestiges of his sugar cane leg, both of which I am wearing, as I write this forlorn tale of grief . I hope that next time you have a Health Care summit you give me an opportunity to tell my story.

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