Your money or your life, or both; health care in America

The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has ignited a whole lot of debate everywhere. I had some driving to do today, and I generally keep the CBC on the car radio. Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s half hour show “Commotion” came on. The producers have upped their game since that program debuted. I found the first few episodes way woke and too Toronto-centric. Today, Elamin had top-shelf writers on, from Vox and Rolling Stone, and they had some insightful observations about media response to Luigi’s first shot in the new class war. They danced around the conundrum all writers in mainstream media are facing. The internet is saturated with thumbs-up emojis on the matter, yet nobody on any mainstream platform is gonna go there. Getting a slot on CBC or Rolling Stone or Vox is way too big a prize. Nobody’s going to screw up their career by being honest about how they really feel about Luigi and Brian. They did mange to foreground a salient point in spite of that; if health insurance is such a major issue for Americans, why was it almost totally absent from the recent election campaign? They know why, they just can’t talk about it. Kamala had over 80 billionaire donors behind her campaign. Trump had about 50. Billionaires in America enjoy gold-plated health care. It’s not an issue for them. Therefore, it’s not an election issue. That’s the way the cookie crumbles when you’ve sold your democracy to the highest bidder.