 Alexis and Richard, I want to thank you for sharing your story with us and helping all of us understand your situation and the situation of so many families here in Texas. I'd like to ask our panelists to come up and I will introduce them to you. To my immediate right and your left, this is Dr. Francis DaVini and Dr. Francis is the Senior Research Associate for the Center of Public Policy Priorities who helped put this film together that we just watched and also she is the Director of Texas Kids Count. And then Richard, and where is Alexis? You're not, do you? No, okay. And Richard James, you all have met him in the video we just saw and they've been living here in San Antonio for about a year. And Kevin Moriarty with the President and CEO of Methodist Healthcare. And so we'd like to open this up for any questions that you might have. Would you all like to begin by making a statement or do you want to start with taking questions? Sure, right. Good evening. Thank you so much for coming out and sharing this film with us tonight. It was a very special project for us at the Center, not only to get to meet such wonderful real Texas families like Richard and Alexis, but also to be able to put life to a lot of the work that we do at the Center for Public Policy Priorities. The Center is very well known for producing some beautiful bar charts and graphs of things that are very important in Texas. But what we really needed was to be able to add a little heart to the story and to really bring truth to those numbers that we had. And so we embarked on something very new for us, which was a film that you just saw, Fighting Chance, to really help people understand that when we say we have, you know, 1.3 million children living in poverty in Texas, what does that look like? Who are these children that we're talking about? Instead of trying to otherize people, to really bring them in to help you understand that they are not dissimilar to you. They have, as you heard in the film, they have all the hopes and dreams that any family would. And their paths are very different. They may have found themselves in a tight economic situation because of a medical issue, or they may have had a job that didn't pay enough, or they may have lost a job. Whatever the situation was, they all found themselves in a place where nobody wants to be. And that's probably the best definition of poverty is that it's somewhere no one wants to be, right? And so what we're trying to do is to be able to use these stories to help people understand that the ideals of having a safe family, a healthy family, a secure family is something that we all share together. And I'd like to say me and Alexis were privileged to be part of this project. You know, a year and a half ago, we would have been oblivious to who these Texas families are on these pie charts. Beautiful pie charts. Yes. But I mean, we learned a lot about the Medicaid system specifically, you know, trying to get care for our son and trying to survive. And, you know, we're both college students. We'd like to think of ourselves as intelligent people. And I mean, it was a situation that I mean, there's, it doesn't matter who you are, you would have been devastated financially, emotionally. And so it's just good to see our, you know, our son up here making a difference and just letting people know that there's people that need these types of programs. And this hardly anything I can say after seeing this. We were happy to join with CPQ to fund it, to put it together, to help put a face to all of the things that are happening to so many people. And as I'll take an opportunity to tell all of you today, your legislator, your legislature has the opportunity to add a million and a half people to Medicaid. And they're debating it. And it's funded. There's a half a million children that are add ons. If that gets through a half a million children. And they think there's some sort of decisioning process that they have to go through to accept your tax money back to expand the Medicaid program. And so this insanity that happens in this state so often around issues of taking care of people who are in need just has to stop. They're just too many people. You know, you the statistic of 26% of our state being uninsured translates to 6 million people. And we're not going to ensure a million and a half because of politics. It's terrible. Doctor, what do you have? You have the mic. Are we going to ask people to come up? We'll take up. Okay, we're take the microphone to you. Okay. All right. If you have, when you have a question, I will start. Okay, Mr. Morari, what would you recommend people here do to advocate for these children? I mean, certainly writing letters and emails, but what else to convince the legislature? Well, all of you know you're legislators. I mean, in Bear County, you don't need to go for the Democrats. You need to find an R. Lyle Larson is an R. He's a nice guy. He's been a county commissioner for a lot of years. You know him. Talk to him. He needs to be on the side of this issue going forward. We just elected Campbell to replace Wentworth. She's a senator. She's an R. She says, No, we're not going to vote with this issue. Somebody needs to call her and say this is about me and my service. This is something I need. That needs to be out there immediately this time around. If it doesn't work this time around, then I would suggest to all of you, you need to be involved in the political process. You need to make your voice heard. You need to have your story out there. You need to get angry about what's happening around you and make it something that drives you every single step of the way. It's absolutely critical and important that these services be available in our communities. It's just a terrible tragedy. I spoke to the legislature two weeks ago and gave them the statistic from two reports, one from Harvard, you know, which they discounted and one from UT Medical Branch in Galveston. One said that 5,000 people would die a year because of lack of services under Medicaid. If this expansion wasn't occurring, one said 9,000. Harvard said nine UTMB Galveston said five. I said choose. But you can change that to zero by allowing these funds to come in. So you need to think about how it impacts an individual life and put that in front of people's face because it's an extraordinarily serious issue. May I add? Sure. So I think it's really important to remember too that the sole function of our elected officials is to make sure that we each have the opportunity to reach our fullest potential, right? That's why we send them there is to create us Texas to create an environment that allows each of us to reach our opportunities that are in front of us, right? And so I think a lot of times people forget that that's their job. That's what they're supposed to be there to do. And they get kind of freaked out by the suits in the big stone building. Okay, but I promise you all of the people who are elected, you know, they're trying they really are trying to do what they think that their constituents want them to do. They think that because that's who they're hearing from. If they don't hear from people saying, What are you doing? Why are you not making choices that represent me? I live in your district. They're going to keep doing what they think people want them to do. And I'll tell you this too. These are also real people. They have to take their cats to the vet. They have tires that blow out on their cars. They have arguments with their teenagers. They are real people, and they're not as intimidating as they seem. And furthermore, the people who answer the phones are probably 22 year old interns who work there from the university. So not that there's anything wrong with being 22 years old. But I'm just saying it's not as intimidating as it would seem. And it's a simple phone call. And what I used to work in the legislature and we assume that for every phone call we got, it was representing the opinion of 100 people. So that's a really, really powerful 30 second phone call that you can make to the capital. And it makes a really big difference, particularly in these last days when they're debating such really important issues around Medicaid expansion. We're also looking at trying to get universal breakfast to all schools who have children about 80% of their kids or more who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch. They're just gonna say, ah, go ahead and give breakfast to everybody. And it's fully federally funded. We don't have to put any money toward that from the state and they're debating it. It's moving. It's moving in the right direction. But so we have programs like that we're talking about payday lending. And that's gotten very bogged down in a lot of the political process. Are you guys familiar with kind of check cashing places and payday lenders and all that? So that's another big step that we can make in Texas to really protect families who maybe don't feel like they have the same kind of financial options that a lot of families do. They are not comfortable with banks or they don't understand the financial situation. And yet one of these very simple things that we can do to help protect families is getting kind of bogged down. So again, I just repeat what Kevin said. And it sounds so simple and it sounds innocuous. But I think really making that call makes a really huge difference. And I can't stress that enough. And they do read those. And you think what does one voice? What does one email? What does one letter mean? But as Dr, I'm sorry, Divini just said, it represents 100 people. And I know from being inside the political process myself, when you get 100 phone calls, they start paying attention. Well, success did happen. And I'd point out Marion Sokol here. Marion, stand up for a minute. Come on, Marion. You can do it. Marion spearheaded the effort on the CHIP Children's Health Insurance Program for the state of Texas. 10 years ago, when Governor Bush was the governor and Governor Bush at the time said Texas was not going to accept that program except that 75% of poverty. And the advocates said 125%. I wanted 200%, you'll recall. I didn't get my way. I agreed with the advocacy group. We went for 125. And in six months, a no was turned to a yes because of all the children's advocates to say, oh, come on, the Children's Health Insurance Program we're not going to accept it in Texas. Somebody told him he wasn't electable as the president if he had a state that was taking care of children at 75% of poverty. How terrible is that? What image is that? And it changed. Two weeks ago, excuse me, I went to Austin with the nuns on the bus with Sister Simone Campbell. And we brought 500 letters signed to the governor. We visited all of our legislators on this issue. What we were told over and over again is even if they pass it, the governor is going to veto it. I came home and I said 500 letters is only a drop in the bucket. We need 50,000 letters. And so I want to ask everybody here, get everyone you can to write to the governor and tell him we need this bill passed. And all of the legislators that I went to said that they would support us. I probably didn't go to any of the hard ones. But they did say they would support it. But I know that there were some who said no. But what they were saying to us, you have to get to the governor because he's going to veto it. I saw a hand up over here. Did someone have a vote? I don't know if this is a question you all can answer. But so often we have these things and we're singing to the choir. So when I see that film, my heart breaks for all of the families. I think about this constantly in just my daily life. But I know that there are really good Texans that I meet and they're friends of mine. And they don't feel the same way. And I'm not sure they'd even view this film in the way that I view it. So I'm just curious to know what it will take to help them to understand that these things are important. Because they don't want their tax money going to these things. They're not thinking about it the way that we're talking about it. So I would just be interested in hearing a good argument that I can make or share with some of those individuals. Well, I'm not really sure I have like the brilliant argument to make. But we're working on it. But what I would say is our ultimate goal, and this is going to sound lofty at first, but give me a moment. Our ultimate goal is really to help people understand that we're all in this together. As we say in the film, it's, you know, every family could be in this situation. And as Richard eloquently said earlier, you know, there's hardly any family that could handle a $1.5, $1.6 million medical bill, right? And so our goal at the center is to really push the message forward and to use this film to talk about that we are all part of a very large community. Now that sounds, you know, kumbayan, touchy-feely, right? So we're actually taking it to the business community. So we've been doing a lot of outreach. We don't want to forget our choir. We like our choir. We want to give support to our choir. But we also have been doing outreach to some nontraditional audiences for us. And so we've been reaching out pretty heavily to the business community, to bankers, to a lot of the influential people in the state. And what we're finding is that they actually do view the film in the same way that you and I might view the film. And they actually do, you know, really identify when you see flesh and blood, you identify with the people in front of you. And so we're using that as a point of departure to say, okay, once we open the heart, how can we find that kind of common place on the table when we're talking about brass tacks. And so we are actually going to be culminating this series of roadshow presentations of the film and talking about some of our other data with a summit in April of 2014 about family economic security. And we will, you know, let you all know about that. We're going to be having it in Austin. I don't have any more details yet, but that is the plan is in April. And our intention is to bring together not only the choir, but to bring together business folks, to bring together small business owners, to bring together bankers, so that we can develop a common and shared legislative agenda for 2015, moving forward to talk about how we can strengthen families' economic security. So I'm not sure that answered your question, but I talked a long time. So maybe it kind of like made you feel nurtured. I have something on that. Something I've noticed is people support programs that benefit them or that they can relate to. And, you know, I've had friends that have put things on, you know, Facebook or social media or talking in just conversation. And, you know, they'll be against, you know, Medicaid expansion or, you know, a whole variety of topics, but then the things that they can benefit from, they're for those programs. And so I think it does go a lot with just putting a face to it. You know, okay, well, I can physically see how this is benefiting somebody else. But I think otherwise it's just a hard, it's a hard thing to comprehend. People can, it's easy to say my tax money is going to helping somebody that's poor and doesn't want to take care of their family. And that's not the case. You know, I would say you probably knew the statistics, but 99% of the time I'm sure that's not the case. And so I think just things like this that show these are real families. These are real people. I think that that does help. I agree with Richard completely. However, if you want the elevator statement, the zinger, the zinger is this, the economic report that's been put out by both Perryman and Hamilton and several others, nobody's non-controvertible report. Everybody in here that pays insurance premium, your premium is $1,600 more because the Medicaid expansion program is not happening in Texas. Okay? Every, every one of your friends that doesn't want to pay taxes is paying $1,600 more. Our hospital district has said, if you're a property owner, your property taxes are 20% higher and would go down. So if you want the elevator speech just on the, you know, you're a conservative person and you don't like paying taxes, well, here are two taxes. You're paying $1,600 more per year for that premium forever until it goes away and your property taxes are going up forever unless this happens. And it's coming out of your pocket. Now if you don't want to do it for any other reason, and we are in a theological place and, you know, we all do believe in life after death and there is an accountability for our actions, you know, you can go down that path as far as I'm concerned as well. You know, it works with the elderly. They're kind of closer to death. You know, I used, I mean, seriously, I speak to very conservative groups of church people and the first thing about it is, well, why should I be paying for Medicaid for some child? I said, well, why should I be paying for a heart transplant for you at 85? I mean, and let's talk about the, you know, and when I say that thing, look at me shocked and I said, well, wouldn't you rather they'll be paying for services for your grandchild? And every single elderly person, you know, they know I'm joking and I get a laugh and I say, well, Medicaid is about your grandchildren, some grandchild, somebody's grandchild, okay? Your child as an adult, your disabled child, and they, they transition to that thinking if you go hard at them in that fashion. But you have to be on popular. If you want to be popular, don't take on this issue. If you want to be invited back to that, by that person, don't, you know, talk. But after the first drink, you know, throw it at him and don't stop. I'm serious. You know, jump on it with two feet. I mean, if you can take it on in that manner, then you're not serious about understanding what it means. And if you are serious about understanding what it means, then you have the perfect right to stand on that ground and not back down. You're going to fight at your family reunions anyway. Why not do it about something really, really important? Yes, in the back of the room. Kathleen right there. Hi, I'm Sister Susan Mika and thank you very much for all of your work on these issues and for the stories. I think that they touch us, you know, at a very deep level and motivate us to keep going and to continue, you know, very hard work. Because I work with the socially responsible investment coalition and we're talking to corporations all the times about their practices. And it's very hard, but we don't give up either. You know, we make a little step forward and one back and one to the side and that type of thing. And I mean, I think that this is the same thing, you know, in a way because you're saying there's a lot of support out there for this. But where is that support? Chambers of commerce. I mean, the hospital systems, you know, the nuns, of course, when we went. But I mean, you know, like, come on, how can we maybe have a broader alliance or how can we be reaching out and supporting each other's efforts? You know, Francis, you're saying that, like, one phone call is worth a hundred other people. What's a letter worth? About a hundred other people. Well, you know, when we're looking at this, I mean, you know, we just got to keep flooding those offices with our thoughts. Because, I mean, you know, sometimes legislators make a change of heart for just a few calls because they don't get that many maybe on a certain topic. Now, on this, I know they're getting a lot of calls because a lot of people are organizing. But I just feel like we have to keep at it. And I know, like, you know, your boss, Scott, was saying too, if we don't get it, we need to get it now. But if we don't get it now, we don't give up. We keep working on it. There's, you know, possibility of a special session. There's, you know, on and on and on. I mean, to me, that's that's what we have to keep that hope up and keep moving along and see, well, what else can we do together? Because, yes, you are talking to the choir here. But we talk to a lot of other people. And how can we mobilize maybe is a better word or something? A lot of the people that are out there. And I'll just add to what Sister Susan said, which is, can you imagine Texas being the only state without Medicare? Can you imagine Texas being the only state without the Children's Health Insurance Program? It will break at some point. Like, right, we will break this wall down at some point. But the speed with which we get there depends on how hard we keep hitting at the wall. We will not be the only state in the country that doesn't have Medicaid expansion or doesn't have, you know, I mean, eventually we will get there. But how fast we get there depends on how hard we keep hitting it. Now we'll add to that, you know, we assumed the same kind of ratio, one call, 100 people, one letter, 100 people. But because people don't write letters anymore, you get a flood of letters, a giant box of letters in the legislator's office and it's really annoying because they're not used to it, right? They're like, what am I going to do with all this paper? My gosh. And so it makes a more of an emotional and a visual impact, but it's harder to get. So, you know, an email goes down the list in your inbox and you kind of disappears. And so, but it's helpful. You can still do that. But a letter, man, it's like touchable and you see it and it's there and if you can get a big giant pile of them, it makes a huge impact. We were in the governor's meeting with his staff and I was sitting there counting these letters and I mean the staff was huge. So, and the staff person was just kind of looking like, oh my gosh, you're right. All right, I just had two things real quick. First, Richard, how are you doing? We're doing, we're doing good. We're doing good. We came up on our, what would have been our son's year birthday. And so, we're doing well, we're doing well. Thank you for asking. And in terms of advocacy, everyone here agrees advocacy is great. So, just pure logistics. You want to do something, you have a bridge group, you have spurs. Where should someone who's here right now go specifically to advocate for the expansion? Well, somebody your age ought to be out on his Twitter account, his Facebook account, his Google account, his i-mail and everything else. And if you could do a ganja man dance thing associated with Medicaid and go viral with a million hits, then, I mean, I'm serious. Your generation has the ability to figure out a different way, okay? And if you can figure out a different way and it gets out there, then you're getting somebody to think, okay? All I'm asking legislators to do is think. Someone asked other conservatives on board this last weekend, Texas Association of Business has voted in favor of the Zawas bill and they've now told as of today, I'm looking to my staff, Sandra, as of today, the most conservative republic-oriented business group of large businesses in Texas have said, pass the damn thing and stop debating it. So, it's not just the advocates for folk because it's the right thing to do. The business community has said, do it. Oh, why? Elevator speech. Every business in Texas that doesn't comply with this cumulatively will hit a $200 to $300 million fine per year that they'll be paying because they're not part of this and so because of the way that the funding is and how you're subsidized at a certain rate. And they know it. They figured it out. They said, well, they don't need that additional cost to them and so all the pieces that are out there is moving people. Now, you said, well, the government is going to veto the bill, right? Well, Zawas is a republican anesthesiologist, chair of the committee out of Houston and he is the supporter of the bill and the bill is a privatization bill, okay? That's what it is. It's a Medicaid privatization, but as far as I'm concerned, if I can get Blue Cross Blue Shield rates for Medicaid, so what? As long as a million 500,000 people get covered, all right? I don't care who gets the admin money. I don't care who takes the 15% admin on it. Happens to be a half a billion dollars a year, which is what they're arguing about. Who gets the profit, okay? I don't care if it goes into the private sector. I want the program and so I think all the advocates need to say get something done, you know, we'll tweak it, we'll figure out what doesn't work down the line and make it happen, but that's what needs to occur. I would say right now you should call the cap, just there's the main, and I'm sorry I don't have it in front of me, but there's a main capital telephone line and if you call that and you tell them like where you live, they will tell you who's your legislator and you can call directly then. It's pretty easy, it will take a couple of minutes. I actually helped organize the nuns on the bus event that was two weeks ago, so if anyone wants to and if it's okay with you all, if they can come to me afterwards I can get them those numbers, I have all them available. Excellent, excellent and then after the session call them again and tell them how like happy or disappointed you are in what happened and then six months down the road call them again because an election is coming up. I get crank calls occasionally, you know, you're welcome to call them every 10 minutes. You know, you've got the time, it's toll free, make a hundred calls, then you know maybe somebody will figure out it's coming from one number, I mean, my wife is sitting there with a microphone so. To challenge you Mr. Moriarty to a ganja man video since I know you're fully capable of tweeting and doing all of that. That hip replacement a couple of years ago, can't do it. That's a good thing, you had good insurance. To Don's point, I really do think, you know, I am part of the choir but I also work for a bank, so I work with a lot of very conservative bankers and they just don't understand the business case for it and so I think a lot of us need to be, I think we all are very sympathetic to families in need in the least served, but I don't think we're being well armed with the information to refute the gibber jabber that they're hearing from the very, very conservative far right. And so I think the more information we have on that, the more helpful it will be because I think we're all sympathetic. I think our hearts break for you and your husband, but it's the business case that we need to hear more of. Well, what we actually originally intended this film to be paired with and it is in many cases is our family budgets work. So if you go to familybudgets.org, it's a new interactive tool that we have online where you can actually go and you look up, you can pull up San Antonio and you say, okay then I want to see, let's create a family and say we want it to be a family who receives health insurance through their employer and it's two parent, two child family and right now they're not saving for anything. And once you make all those choices, it automatically fills in what that family would need to make in order to make ends meet in San Antonio, New Braunfels area. And if you fill all that in, a two parent, two child family needs to make $39,000 a year for those two parents together. And that's with, and that's you know, a considerable amount of money for many families. And so what we find is that when you actually change it to be a single parent in particular, then they only have to make $34,000 a year, but it's like $17 an hour for a single parent. $17 an hour, that is a really high wage. And so a lot of times when we're talking to business people, not only do we talk about kind of the bigger business numbers about kind of the impact on their particular business in terms of fines, but also on the individual families, how you're having to pay more for your health insurance premiums, but we also talk about their workers. And so we say, can you afford to pay your workers $17 an hour to make ends meet? And they're like, no, I can't afford it. Well, it's like, that's right. But do you think that they should be healthy enough to come to work? Yes. Do you want them to be healthy enough to come work? Yeah, we do. And do you want them to be able to save so their kid can go to college? Well, yeah, we do. So what do we need to put in place to be able to make sure that that happens? If you can't afford to pay them in that much, but you think they need to be healthy, how are we going to get that done? And you kind of lead them down the path and you actually get them to talking about what are the options? Because as a small business owner, let's say, they can't afford health insurance for their employees, because it's just they're getting priced out of the market just like individual families are. And say, we understand that you're struggling with that. Families are struggling with that too. What do we need to have in place to be able to make sure that they can be healthy enough to get to your job every day? And that's kind of that's kind of some of the conversation that we're having. But we add in all those other business points too that your husband eloquently laid out for us. So yeah. So we are currently engaging in what we're calling the road to a better Texas. So it's a road show where we're doing a lot of meetings like this, but not only with our choir groups, but also with business organizations and trying to reach a whole varied list with meeting with chambers and meeting with elected officials. And right now we've already taken this around to we've had about 20 different presentations reaching about 2,000 people. And it has played on Austin's PBS station several times. It has played on help me out Alexa. It's played on Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Fort Worth, Alaska. It's actually played on Alaska's PBS station and New Orleans. New Orleans and oh somewhere on the east coast. Yeah. So we've gotten several PBS stations to play a multiple times on their stations. We also have it on our YouTube station as well. And we've been giving out and we actually have copies of the DVD. We have a few copies of the DVD with us tonight. And so we're giving it out for people to play and what we're finding is it's kind of going a little bit viral where people are like taking the DVDs and playing them in for their boards. They're in they're playing them for their meetings that they're holding and we're not even there. So it's actually going well in terms of getting the message out. What we really hope is that this is not just going to be kind of a feel good for the choir but it's actually going to bring people together in the summit in April to really start making an actual point by point plan that we can all sign on together where we get businesses and activists and advocates together to sign on to a legislative agenda for 2015. I am so sorry to not have mentioned that. Of course we actually do have the faith community involved. Methodist healthcare ministry is actually funded funded the film with us and so we actually do actively have the faith community involved and that is my bad for not mentioning that. That is an excellent idea. Can you get me in? Absolutely. All right. I will talk to you after. And I'm serious about that. I'm not being sassy. I mean that would be great. Okay. Excellent. You'll you'll like me a lot. Most of you won't see this but starting Wednesday we're going to release three vignettes less than a minute in very conservative markets in north and central Texas that basically say what if Texas were to have a Medicaid program profiling children families and others and we're paying for the media so we can get in prime time and then the media stations are going to give us additional media because we are a nonprofit but we're buying the media because we want to be in prime time in those communities with a strategy to have those communities call in and again we're targeting the communities of the committee members that are going to make the decision on this issue and we're starting that Wednesday I'm going to run it through the end of the month. The legislature ends on the 27th of May and so again I've been on a lot of these issues before and it typically takes in Texas is a pretty slow state so it's it's at least two sessions before they get it so we may have to be a session away but we've told the legislature we're not going away. I mean we've reminded them that we've been on these issues before and we're not going anywhere except back and we are gonna I mean I'll do a report with Dr. Brody or the Harvard report that annotates the 9,000 deaths per year by county by rep and start doing publicity on that you're killing people it's 9,000 a year so if it takes two years that's 18,000 deaths and you will figure out where they are. Again something has to happen to get people to understand this is pain and suffering I see my staff and I see it I mean we are we fund the charity care we fund the interventions we have the individuals walking in the door with cancer and tertiary stage and we're doing the tomb removals with people that are gonna die and we see them our doctors our nurses our staff and it's avoidable it's absolutely avoidable and that's what's driving us to get this done that's what the healthcare industry sees the avoidability of all of this pain and suffering. And Richard would you share with us your experience with the system? So as you saw in the video we at first were a little naive to the system and we understood that our son was gonna have some pre-existing conditions and we knew that that meant we wouldn't be able to get our own insurance however Alexis was on private insurance under her father and we were just under the misconception that he would have continuous coverage from there. Quickly we realized that that wasn't the case within hours we had representatives from the hospital you know we need to get these Medicaid applications we need to get these things filled out. One of the things that was startling about the actual application itself is it's not it doesn't look at what you need it looks at what you have and so you know we had some money and savings we're both college students we both had pretty nice car still very low-paying jobs we're just still college students and so what we had initially disqualified us from any kind of benefits and so we had to you know we had to do things we had to give one of our vehicles to her mother so that that wouldn't be counted I mean the the cost of of our son's care was staggering I mean in the millions of dollars and they're looking at our you know means like $30,000 in savings as something to disqualify us and it was eye-opening it was just eye-opening and you know we got through it but if it wasn't for if it wasn't for Medicaid and receiving that help and getting the best care because we had some of the best care that we could we actually moved to San Antonio for his care because we were living in Lubbock and so we completely had to relocate and I don't think people realize that either that I mean this is your child so you're gonna just completely change your whole life and we did and so we wouldn't have had six months with our son if it wasn't for the healthcare and able to get Medicaid and I mean I think it was like four million dollars by the end of it and we wouldn't have had four million dollars to keep providing our son healthcare so he would have been in that statistic and we wouldn't have had to this doesn't seem quite to fit now because we this question about the faith-based community but there is a church in Dallas who's developed this app and a local church CBC has just and if we could if we could get the churches to put a link from their app their phone app either the film or you know the elevator I mean the church that has it in town has 23,000 who came at Easter 23,000 who watch on TV I mean watch so that's those are those are pretty big numbers and I know the church in Dallas who has you know that same capability you know if we could approach them and we could even get you know minimum so Domenica stand up okay Domenica is of the appropriate age to know about apps social media Twitter etc you tell her the app she'll figure out how to link it okay right tomorrow right one two three it's easy to link I can tell you what our church app is but I don't know the guy in Dallas who developed this and now churches at least can can pay for for this this application and I you know I mean CBC's got a lot of people in it and they only pay $10,000 okay don't quote that but I think this is the kind of conversation that we need to not only have in this room but we need to have out in the communities and not be afraid to have out in the communities and try to be in this that exact kind of creative thinking about how do we get the message out there about what Texas children and families need we can't just do it when we feel comfortable in a room together we have to be able to have those difficult and creative conversations out in the world as well and I love your creative ideas so please please come share them with us well and I would end and on a different note and that's this and you can go out to our website mhm.org and go to our quick links and download a report called do this and you shall live I think it's still there right and we did that report so that we could follow every single faith's agenda on taking care of the unfunded and the least served and so regardless of whether you're Episcopal Catholic Baptist Methodist Jewish or Muslim it doesn't matter your faith traditions compel you to do the right thing for people and so the report is do this and you shall live you don't need to know the numbers you don't need to know Medicaid you don't need to know about food stamps our faith traditions tell us all that we need to do these things because it's the right thing to do and so that's you know take that book with you and you don't need to know the data you don't need to know the numbers you just need to say you know what faith that you you're on page nine here read it I mean we did the same thing on children's issues we had every faith leader sign an encyclical on children's health care why the Catholic bishops letter the Lutheran Metonatter every single letter of every one of the denominations on a national level said we need to do these things for children well then if I'm meeting with an Episcopal about just the Catholic legislator I don't need to talk about whether he's an R or D I ask him if he goes to church and I said by the way why aren't you doing this because you go to church that's what it says I've asked the leaders of every denomination to talk to their legislators in their place when they're at church why not that's what you that's the space you own at least 40 at least 40 four score in 10 right well thank you all so very much I mean we have nearly a hundred people here everybody makes a call or a letter that's 10,000 and then just going out to reach to four or five of your friends and getting them to do that that's 50,000 that you want to deliver to the governor so there's a lot of power in this room a lot of power in this room and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort but thank you all very much thank you all for your time thank you I want to call you Dr. Francis and said Divini at that one time yes thank you it was really great you're fine nice all right thank you you're really free to be in here to have the time to do this it's enlightening