Letter of Support from Pete Seeger, Arun Gandhi, Granny D, Stuart-Sinclair Weeks

A DREAM BECOMING TRUE?

A FREE HOSPITAL INSPIRED BY THE SPIRIT OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
DEVOTED TO HEALING AND RENEWAL IN AND FOR OUR TIME

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breath free….”
Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (Statue of Liberty)

December 16, 2009

Dear Friends,
 
Whoever you are, something has attracted you to this web site. Might it be the promise of healing that Patch represents, healing on both the individual and societal level, healing as the deepest expression of our “calling” as fellow human beings?
 
If so, we invite you to join the good doctor in fulfilling his long-kept promise by helping Patch break ground in this upcoming 40th year, 2010, for the Patch Adams Teaching Center and Hospital in Pocahontus County, West Virginia – Patch’s own fields of dreams.
 
Four recognitions/cornerstones underlie the teaching center and hospital:
 
1) There are certain things in life that not even money can buy. One is healing, to be distin-guished, as we’re discovering, from treatment, medical treatment. In the truest sense of the word, healing is a gift. This fact was understood, clearly, during earlier periods of our history when health care focused on just that, care, a service – as opposed to the bottom-line.
 
2) We all use money in 3 ways: to purchase, loan, and make gifts. The third way, gifting, is what brings impulses of healing and renewal into our world and, thereby, creates our future.
 
3) Indeed, we recognize that this is the case. In our better moments, we seek to give of our gifts and, thus, contribute to healing in and for our time. Key is finding a worthy cause to inspire us.
 
4) The Patch Adams hospital is committed to providing medical care to citizens in the poorest of America’s 50 states, a model for the other 49 states and for our larger world. As such, it does not participate in the current economic model: from “fee for service”, through exclusions of treatments, to insurance coverage/restrictions. Instead, patients are placed at the center of the care model, beginning with a respect for, and openness to, the treatment that they feel can best serve their healing. This was the heart of a recent health care presentation Patch was invited to give to Republican members of Congress:
 
“I did not intend to create a model that would be THE answer to the problems in health care; but to model creative problem solving and to spark each medical facility to design their own ideal.”

The health care to be offered will be free, because Patch and his colleagues recognize healing to be, first and foremost, a labor of love. Practiced, as such, we trust that the work will draw to it all the resources required.
 
On the human side, not only do hundreds of patients and their families wait for the Patch Adams Hospital and Teaching Center to open its doors, but so do doctors, nurses, medical students, therapists, and volunteers from around the world. Patient and staff alike await the opportunity to work, together, to create a model for health care that our ailing world has long sought.
 
With respect to the financial side, your support as citizens will be indispensable to building the dream – a true gift. Thus we reach out to people of all backgrounds, races, nationalities, and generations: from great-grandparents, down to grandparents, parents, and children alike, who recognize that in a humane world we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers -- members of a larger Family.
 
As was the case with the raising of our Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, we invite you — on your own behalf and/or on behalf of family members – to contribute your pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars, $1, $2, $5, or more – as your fortunes allow, here online or by mail to
Gesundheit! Institute, P.O. Box 50125, Arlington, VA 22205 USA.
 
We reach out to fellow citizens because large donors and sums of money alone will not build us the free hospital and teaching center that we envision. Rather, what will both erect, and sustain, that promise of healing is a circle of friends, spanning our globe, whose offerings are accompanied, no less, by your heartfelt thoughts and prayers.
 
In that spirit, we encourage you to share this vision with friends, inviting them to take up the torch and, thereby, lend a hand in inaugurating a grass-root, healthcare movement, dedicated to the healing and renewal that, we trust, one and all seek. As Patch’s labors attest:

MIRACLES  HAPPEN!
(When we keep/kindle the faith)

Thank you for your support.

Pete Seeger, Arun Gandhi, Granny D, Stuart-Sinclair Weeks