On Thursday, Sarah O. of Westerville, Ohio, went to Chicago to meet President Obama. Sarah is one of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers organizing for health insurance reform, and last week she was selected to meet the President in Chicago so that he could personally thank her for her work.

Photo by Steve Kagan

Sarah, a former college and high school journalism teacher and lifelong Ohio resident, volunteered to help elect President Obama last year. She shared a bit about her night in Chicago and why she’s working to make sure we pass health insurance reform now:

I’m Sarah, from Westerville, Ohio, and I just got back from the trip of a lifetime — meeting President Obama in Chicago.

It was an amazing night. After writing an essay about why I support health care reform, I was fortunate enough to be selected for a trip to Chicago, where President Obama thanked me for my work. But he also thanked all of you. He thanked us for knocking on doors, making phone calls, telling our health care stories, and digging deep to donate and make this all happen. Thanks to our work, we’re closer than we’ve ever been to making health insurance reform a reality.

We all have incredibly personal reasons for fighting for health care reform, and this is mine: While I’ve had health insurance all of my life, others in my family haven’t been so lucky. My husband lost his job last fall along with thousands of other Americans, and his employer-paid health insurance went with it. Because he’d had a carcinoma removed a year earlier, when he tried to find private health insurance he was told if he were to develop more cancer in the future, it would not be covered. Fortunately, he now has a new job, but it pays less than half of what he was earning in his previous position and doesn’t provide health care insurance to new hires.

Wherever I go, everyone I meet has a health care story like mine about a family member, friend, or colleague. This is why we need reform, and this is why we need it right now, this year.

The reason I volunteered in my small town to help elect President Obama was his message of hope. I am fighting for health care reform today as an extension of that hope. We did it before, so we can do it again — and turn the change we worked so hard for last fall into real improvements in the lives of millions of Americans.

We’ve come too far to stop now.

Sarah O.

To all of you who have walked, called, worked and organized to make health insurance reform a reality over the past months, thank you. As the President explained, your work has brought us closer to real reform than we as a country have ever been — but there’s still much work left to do.