Mitch McConnell Refused to Meet With Group That Fu

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Mitch McConnell Refused to Meet With Group That Funded His Polio Recovery

Class act, the turtle is.

Say a charity group helps you recover from polio. Decades later, representatives from that same organization ask to have a word about your bill being drafted in secret that would reportedly gut healthcare for millions, including people with disabilities, while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. You might at least hear them out. Some people might even say that you owe them one.

Southern gentleman and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though, apparently disagrees. As Death and Taxes recently pointed out, McConnell contracted polio as a two-year-old. As he described years later, on the 50th anniversary of the polio vaccine being introduced, polio is a virus that comes on like the flu, but can paralyze people for life. In McConnell's case, after he'd gotten over the initial illness, he had residual effects in his left quadriceps muscle.

McConnell was lucky enough that his family lived within driving distance of Warm Springs, Georgia, home to the first (and for many years, the only) hospital devoted solely to treating people with polio.

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had himself been paralyzed by polio, created a charity called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) to support the hospital and aid polio patients around the country. Comedian and radio personality Eddie Cantor called for Americans to send their spare change to President Roosevelt, in "a march of dimes to reach all the way to the White House."


https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3zbmz/m...ealth-bill

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