Stop the presses! Big news! Donald Trump said something
that wasn’t bullshit!
The Trump comment that blew open the news cycle is
this: Turning to Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, he said, “You have
better healthcare than we do.”
Yes, like pretty much every developed country in
the world except ours, Australia has government-mandated universal health care.
As Bernie Sanders tweeted in response to Trump’s accidental truth-telling: “President
Trump is right. The Australian healthcare system provides healthcare to all of
its people at a fraction of the cost than we do.”
This leaves us with two questions. (Three, if you
count, “How did this clueless blowhard get to be president?”): First, “Why don’t
we have inexpensive universal coverage like Australia, Canada, France, South
Korea, etc.?” and, second, “Why, if universal health care is a good thing, did Trump
push for the repeal-Obamacare vote in the House that made this worthy goal ever
more unreachable?”
The answer to both of these questions is money -
foul and fetid money. Such money has an epoxy-like grip on our elected
officials, and, since a lot of this dirty money comes from the insurance and
pharmaceutical companies, our GOP-controlled Congress favors these corporations
while giving the shaft to the rest of us. A health care plan that enriches Aetna
and Allstate by stripping away our coverage, makes conservative Republicans
happy. Right now, they are ecstatic.
A Brief Lesson in Washington Ecology:
Corporate money lets callous bastards win
elections;
once in office, these bastards rewrite laws
that help corporations suck more money out of us
which they funnel to their pro-corporate
conservative reps for the next election cycle.
It’s the Circle of Life, Washington Swamp version.
The system wouldn’t work if more voters could
figure out how to protect their own interests. But this doesn’t seem to be in
the cards right now. Millions of them were duped last November by a corrupt,
bullshit-spewing, corporate bastard who seems to regard the White House as his
family’s latest marketing platform. Of course, when they start to lose their insurance
coverage because of the new so-called health care plan, some voters may start
to see the light. Should that happen, I wonder if they will remember the one
honest comment that Trump made about health care – that our system is worse
than Australia’s government-mandated, universal-coverage program.
