During the Republican National Convention (RNC), you heard from many formerly forgotten Americans like me who learned, for better or for worse: politics is going to get into your life whether you get into politics or not.
When I survived a notoriously deadly medical error five years ago—only to be diagnosed with a rare and terminal bone cancer—I expected my health decisions to be personal not political. But Joe Biden and the Democrats had other plans.
I discovered my healthcare “rights” were rights I didn’t want—the right to marijuana, opioids and assisted suicide. I was told I was a burden to my family and to my country—and that by choosing to die early, I’d actually be saving the lives of others by preserving resources for them rather than wasting them on a lost cause like myself. And when I failed the chemotherapies on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials—I’d make them look bad. They didn’t give me the right-to-try experimental treatments. But Donald Trump did.
The terminally ill have never found ourselves on anyone’s shortlist let alone the President of the United States’. Career politicians like Joe Biden cared more about what would help them politically than what would help people personally.
But when President Trump says “one life lost is too many,” he means it. That’s why I know he will always protect people with pre-existing conditions. Because he’s protected us—the terminally forgotten, the terminally ill. When others didn’t want to take a chance on us, President Trump fought to give us a “fighting chance.”
It’s “very personal” for him. He said so before signing “Right to Try” in 2018, giving thousands of terminally ill Americans like me, “the help, the hope, and the fighting chance — and I think it’s going to be better than chance — that they will be cured, that they will be helped, that they’ll be able to be with their families for a long time or maybe just for a longer time.”
But this election, we could lose all that. In fact, this election could be the last time we vote on healthcare. For the last time Joe Biden promised to protect people with pre-existing conditions, we lost our plans and we lost our doctors. This time, Joe Biden would take us one step closer to government-controlled healthcare. His so-called “public option,” would destroy private insurance plans—something more than 250 million Americans rely upon—by undercutting their ability to compete against government-subsidized plans.
And thus, Joe Biden would pave the way for Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s dream of a socialist single-payer system as more Americans would be drawn onto government-run healthcare. We wouldn’t just be unable to keep our doctors, we’d be lucky if we could see any doctor. And even then, some of us would be denied care. It’s already happening in other national health services like the UK’s. For in socialized medicine, you don’t beat the odds. You become the odds. And I would lose my Right to Try just like Charlie Gard, that terminally ill British baby, whose government-run healthcare system decided it was too expensive and too “cruel” to keep him alive.
Honoring the great American story may have been the week-long theme of the Republican National Convention, but we can make it eight years long. We’re living a great American story only because Donald Trump is in it—and the people, not the politicians, are writing it. Let’s not forget that as Joe Biden forgot us—for policies aren’t just written on pages of paper but in the pages of our stories.
This November let’s turn the page on socialism. Let’s choose a patient advocate over a political one. Let’s keep America great!
Natalie Harp is an entrepreneur and Advisory Board member for Donald J. Trump for President.