Capital For A Day: Calvert County
June 19, 2009
It's great to be with all of you in this wonderful county. That great comptroller from Calvert County once said Maryland's smallest county in area, but one of its biggest in history. And the history of this county is the history of neighbors helping neighbors.
And Brandon Green, I want to thank you for your story. And one of the things that Brandon said, for those of you that are care-givers, he said that time and again he found himself having to lean on faith and family. And he also had to lean on friends, the friends that, like all of you who come to this place of healing to give of your own talents, to give of your own care and your compassion for one another in this terrific place.
We have made the entire county Capital For A Day and I could not think of a better place than this, Calvert Memorial Hospital. We've just come from a prayer breakfast with local pastors and talked about some things that we could do together to help families get through these really, really tough times, to do the sorts of things that we have the freedom, the power, and the ability to do as Marylanders -- like eradicate childhood hunger in our State.
And I'm going to be taking a tour of the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum shortly and we're going to round out our day by bringing all the agency Secretaries together in a cabinet meeting where we hear from the local elected officials.
So often we communicate through emails and through phone calls, but to be able to be face-to-face and to have a cabinet Secretary here like John Colmers, who is here from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and Buddy Hance -- and you're from Southern Maryland, too, aren't you, Buddy? (Laughter.)
President Miller wore me out on that one, day in and day out. (Laughter.) Buddy Hance of Southern Maryland, Mr. President.
And we will be meeting with agricultural interests in the county as well and that's where we're also going to wrap up.
This is a very good day, because today we're marking the opening of a center which will touch countless lives every day.
The great Frederick Douglass once said that we are one and our cause is one and we must help each other if we are to succeed.
And that's what this day is all about. Ensuring the health of our citizens is a core part of what it means to be a strong State. And we are a stronger State than most.
But it's not by chance, it's by choice. It's by the choices we make to do things like investing in affordable college and investing in the best public school system in the United States of America.
While other states -- you're reading about them in the newspapers -- are shedding citizens from healthcare rolls, we've actually added approximately 100,000 people to healthcare rolls, to decent healthcare coverage in our State in the last couple of years.
It's easy to make progress in easy times, but it's more meaningful in really, really tough times.
