I’m at a different stage of life from you, having just finished caring for my father during his final illness.

I spent two years advocating for him to insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals.

As a man who worked hard his entire life and had a decent pension and good supplemental health insurance, Dad literally could not afford the medication he needed to keep him alive.

I spent hours on the phone, often every day, working those problems, finding ways to afford his pills and inhalers.

The harsh truth is that if I had not been there, he simply would have died. He would have run out of critical medications, nobody would have cared, and he would have died.

When I first began managing his care, I didn’t think something like that could happen in the United States. I thought there were programs. I thought there were safety nets. I didn’t think we as a nation let people die because they couldn’t afford medication.

But we do. And that must not continue.