Politics & Power Quote by Debbie Wasserman Schultz

There is a deliberate braid of the personal and the procedural here: Wasserman Schultz starts with the intimacy of "honestly, folks that I talk to" and then snaps to a hard statistic, "2.5 million", before landing on the clincher, "that I am one of". It is identity as credential, deployed to pre-empt the usual cynicism about politicians borrowing other people's pain. She is not just advocating for survivors; she is placing herself inside the risk pool.

The intent is policy defense through lived experience, and the subtext is a warning shot across the bow at insurers and, implicitly, at any political project that would weaken protections for preexisting conditions. The repetition and mid-sentence stumbles ("because of - because") read less like polished oratory than like someone trying to keep emotion from breaking the frame. That matters: disfluency can signal authenticity in a media environment trained to suspect scripting.

Contextually, this sits squarely in the post-ACA battlefield where "preexisting condition" became a shibboleth for a broader argument about what health insurance is supposed to be. Is it a consumer product that can exclude high-cost customers, or a social contract that spreads risk? "We're done" is the key rhetorical move: it turns a wonky regulatory clause into a moral red line and a collective, irreversible decision. The "we" recruits survivors as a political constituency, not merely a patient population, and forces opponents to argue not with abstractions but with bodies that have already paid the price.