A good friend of mine died Friday. He was only 50 years old, in good shape from years of construction work, didn't smoke or drink much – but Joe died today of a massive heart attack and I miss him already. The world is a little bit less with the lack of Joe.

Another friend of mine tells me that, on Friday morning, Joe wasn't feeling well, so his partner (common-law wife by now) took him to the doctor. You know how men are – they never want to go to the doctor unless they feel like they're about to die because there may be needles involved – so when he got in the car with her, she knew that something was terribly wrong.

Joe is ("was" is still too hard to say) a fly in the ointment – not always the life of the party – but almost. He's the instigator, he laughs the loudest from his belly, he's the first to get on his motorcycle – without a map – and say, "Let's go!" (Until that time he jumped back on his bike that had been sitting in the desert sun of Tonopah, Nev., for a few hours wearing the tattered jeans with the hole in crotch – and not wearing even boxer shorts underneath his jeans! – and had to miss the whole rest of the trip due to burns on very sensitive areas). But he was the guy who was always the last to go to sleep on a camping trip - and cleaned up the campsite and got it ready for coffee in the morning while everyone else was already asleep and dreaming of pancakes.

After his partner brought Joe, who didn't have health insurance or the $150 the doctor required for an office visit, back home, he died from a massive heart attack several hours later.

If California already had in place SB 840, Sen. Sheila Kuehl's universal health care bill, Joe would be alive right now. It probably never occurred to him to go to the emergency room at the hospital because he had always gone to his doctor's office in the past. But he no longer had health insurance or the $150 to get checked out.

Please urge our politicians to support SB 840.

www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/HCA_CA/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7081

E-mail Terre Logsdon at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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