Sunday, May 7, 2017

Trump Accidentally Makes Sense



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.


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