By Joseph Q. Jarvis | Published: 22 June 2026
Happy belated Father’s Day! I spent the bulk of my father’s day with my mother in Phoenix. We had had several great days of reminiscing, eating out for lunch, going to the movies, and taking in some of the sights common in my adolescence.
My mother is alive and doing well now on into her 90’s because for thirty years Medicare has financed needed health care for her. She has undergone several major orthopedic procedures because of injuries, countless months of therapy thereafter, open heart surgery, and many many other interventions. She has medications, physician visits, and diagnostic services on a regular basis. This is the kind of social good made possible when we Americans all work together and promote the general welfare.
Once I made my way from my mom’s place to the airport later on Father’s Day to return home, I met Teame, an uber driver. He drives every day and has done so since the major electronics assembly plant where he worked for the bulk of his career closed a few years ago. According to him, an investment firm bought the plant with the promise to keep it open and save the jobs there. He had been so concerned about the closure of this plant that he had contacted his member of Congress many times, and in fact had met with him in person. He was always promised that his government would work to keep those jobs in Arizona so that he and others could support their families and earn their retirements. They had good health care benefits at that job. And then, of course, the investment firm decided to close the plant and sell of the property. No one seemed to be able to explain why, and the Member of Congress, apparently, simply shrugged it off. He is now a gig worker with no health benefits. His wife has a job but the health benefit is paltry. The deductible is so high it is unaffordable. All of his kids are in the same boat with him and his wife. None of his Kids were able to spend Father‘s Day with him because, like him, they were at work.
I told Teame that I was a physician and had observed that private investment firms were also buying up health care facilities, shutting them down, and valuing them as real estate. Doctors, nurses, and therapists, like Teame and his colleagues, were losing their jobs because profiteering favored some other use for the real estate than health care. I also said that I believed that politicians of both parties receive political donations from the investor class and therefore our elected leaders care more about what corporations want than what people need.
I went on to explain that We the People need to begin to recognize that our elected leaders don’t care about us or our families’ needs. We need to rewrite law for our own benefit and then bypass our elected officials with ballot initiatives. I outlined my efforts to make real and sustainable health system reform happen in Utah and invited him to visit our website at View source at utahcares.health. I said I would like to start a similar movement in Arizona, the state where I grew up and where I still have family. Teame thanked me and told me he would check out the website.
Ladies and Gentlemen, what I told to Teame I reiterate to you. This is an election year. Throw the bums out. Every incumbent should be suspect. There is no need to invest in politics as usual. The two major political parties are both failing us.
Are you concerned about your future? Can you afford to get the health care you or your family needs? Do you have to work gig jobs seven days each week? Do you have a retirement fund? Can you afford your rent? Your groceries?
Stop pretending that politics as usual will fix this. Throw the bums out. And look for ways, like the Utah Cares ballot initiative, to actually do something good for people without depending upon elected politicians, who are pocketing corporate cash and generally don’t care about what We the People need at all.
This picture is of me telling it like it is on the street in front of Nancy Pelosi’s house on Billionaire Row in San Francisco back when she was still Speaker of the House. Back then, she could have gaveled in congressional sessions where the House of Representatives could have voted for better, simpler health care financed fairly for all of us. But she chose not to do that. Almost every other member of Congress has chosen likewise. Throw them out. Vote for somebody else this year. And don’t donate any money to politics as usual. If you have discretionary funds which you generally give to political parties or candidates, withhold it from them and give it to the Utah Cares Political Issue Committee. We will use those funds to fight for your family to have financing for every medically necessary kind of care, just like my mother has been receiving for thirty years.
Make your donation at View source at utahcares.health.
Thank you.
Dr. Joseph Q. Jarvis is a public health physician, chair of the Utah Cares Political Issue Committee and author of several books, including The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care and What the Single Eye Sees: Faith, Hope, Charity, and the Pursuit of Discipleship.