"I never felt poor in my life."

A retired friend recently underwent surgery, is recovering, and is now at home with the need for three or four medications -- two of them on a permanent basis.

He is on Social Security and Medicare, however, one of the permanent medications is not covered and costs about $250 a month. That may not sound like much to a lot of people. But when you're on a fixed income, and one prescription costs you $3,000 a year, you're talking a hell of a lot of money.

Before becoming ill, my friend had no problem with basic survival. Today, he said to me "I never felt poor in my life. How did this happen?"

This is a devastating commentary on what our country has become. There's no need to go into detail about how we got here. Virtually everyone on DU knows what happened to America over the past few decades, and especially the past eight years.

But there is one important detail that none of us can overlook. Our system is broken. It must be fixed. And we can never allow this to happen to us again.

On edit: I'm trying to help my friend find different state/local agencies that might help. Florida is a (mostly) Republican state, so my expectations are low. (I truly believe that anyone who votes for any Republican is either tremendously wealthy, or tremendously ignorant.)

and all the neocons since have completed the job. Mission Accomplished.

NAFTA came about because the Clintons supported it - in fact, they took staff away from working on the campaign finance reform bill in order to work on NAFTA. Globalization effort wer full stream ahead throught the two terms that Bill Clinton served.

And Hillary Clinton's initial proposal for Health Care never got support from the average American because her plan was including the big corporations. This meant that Universal health Care was going to cost us 30% more than it needed to so that the health care industry would get aboard (And even with that kind hand out from Mrs Clinton, the healthcare industry did not get behind it anyway.)