Dr. Danielle Mitchell is the medicine to help you never again have to vote for incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann.
Fleischmann wants you to believe that finally' after four terms and eight years, he's learned his way around the science of Oak Ridge and the funding hurdles of building a replacement lock. The reality is that he finally had to tell Grover Norquist that, yes, it does take new taxes. But even that took Sen. Lamar Alexander's arm twisting and the face-saving semantics of renaming the tax a towboat "user fee." But that's just the half of it. He also voted for every iteration of repealing, sabotaging and gutting the Affordable Care Act.
Vote this year instead for a self-made woman and physician. Mitchell is a campaigner who is passionate about us - Americans in need of honest and affordable health care. Affordable care for us and affordable care for our government.
Mitchell has lived her concern about health care - both as a caretaker, a patient and a doctor.
She grew up poor in a family that regularly had to depend on government resources to survive. By the time she was 12, she had attended six different elementary schools "because my family was evicted from house after house or we had to move for work."
She's had her own medical emergencies and now owns and operates a local clinic that serves nearly 1,300 patients - with and without insurance. To save, she mops and cleans the clinic herself. Although she advocates a "no labels" political landscape, we think she exemplifies everything positive about the words "hard-working," "true conservative," "independent," "progressive" and "Democratic."
Mitchell is a quick study. She notes that Tennessee isn't a red state. It's a non-voting state, since we're dead last in the nation for voter turnout. We're also No. 1 in bankruptcy, mostly because of health care's devastating havoc on our uninsured and under-insured population. Meanwhile, we have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. Are you sensing a pattern? You should.
This year, vote for a real mind. Vote for Democrat Danielle Mitchell. She's nowhere near as well-funded as Fleischmann, so you've not heard enough about her. Go to her website, mitchell4congress, read her story, consider her policy and vote your heart.