Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

Sickness as strategy.

Some may consider what I’m writing about today as controversial, but frankly, I don’t care at this point. If you don’t see this as a real possibility, you’re not looking very hard. The Trump administration and its allies in the GOP-led states are pursuing a very cavalier policy regarding COVID-19 and their plans to reboot the economy. They have minimized the impact of the current crisis, essentially hiding the ball on fundamental questions of who has been infected, who has been exposed, and even who has died as a result of this awful virus. They have openly denigrated the idea of expansive testing, Trump first among those calling testing “overrated” and complaining that more testing means more cases. They have characterized the risks of ending the shutdown as risks worth taking, and have encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” worthy of sacrifice.

Now, we know that Trump wants things to magically return to normal so that he can have a better shot at re-election. But why would any president seeking a second term advocate policies that would result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead Americans? I think a fairly convincing answer lies in the demographics of those most severely affected by this virus. According to current research (see this APM report), the COVID-19 death rate among Black Americans is almost 2-1/2 times that of White Americans. Nationwide, Blacks make up 22.7% of COVID deaths, significantly over-representing their numbers; they make up a much larger percentage of losses in states like Georgia, Mississippi, Michigan, South Carolina, etc. It’s no secret, either, that this disease hits people harder when they have fewer resources, less access to quality health care, more exposure to conditions associated with poverty, and so on.

In other words, this disease hits hardest those people who tend not to vote for Donald Trump in particular and Republicans in general. When Trump and GOP governors push for workers to go back to the mill, the restaurant, the fields, etc., they know that those people are not their core supporters. If they drop dead, it’s no skin off of Trump’s nose – in fact, it may in some small way contribute to his victory. A cynical suggestion? Not at all. Trump bends every effort towards giving himself an advantage in the November general election. He has railed against vote-by-mail, particularly in states like Michigan, whose leaders he has threatened with federal funding cuts – this in the odd belief that vote-by-mail favors Democrats. (Based on his own comments, he certainly thinks that more people voting is bad news for Republicans.) He is a self-dealing bullshit artist, and not a particularly convincing one, either. How he garnered as many votes as he did in 2016 I’ll never know. (PT Barnum had a theory about that.)

Dark people, poor people, undocumented laborers … they’re all expendable, worthy of sacrifice for the sake of decent economic numbers going into the Fall. How long are we going to stand for this crap?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Cashectomy.

By rights, this should be an open letter to former Vice President Joseph Biden, a man who has nothing but good to say about employer-based health insurance. It actually dovetails fairly nicely with the first episode of my political podcast, Strange Sound, which was dedicated to that topic. As I mentioned therein, I am a subscriber to such a health plan – one of perhaps 170 million subscribers in the U.S., though that number has gone down by millions in recent weeks due to massive layoffs, furloughs, etc. I had cause to make considerable use of my coverage over the last month or so, and I am now experiencing the second wave of trauma that typically accompanies major illness in the United States: medical billing.

I’ll preface this with a brief “explanation of benefits”, as they say in the insurance game. I have what is known as a high deductible plan: health coverage that carries a $3,600 annual deductible, which means that I pay for the first $3,600 in medical charges, with some small exceptions, via a Health Savings Account. My employer kicks in about two-thirds of that. (They also cover about 80 to 85% of my premium costs, so as I said on Strange Sound, they are what makes the plan remotely affordable.) If I meet the deductible (i.e. incur $3,600 worth of medical charges), the insurance company starts picking up 90% of my medical costs; I pay a 10% co-pay until I reach another $3,600 hurdle, which is my “out of pocket maximum” of $7,200 per calendar year. After that, the insurance company is supposed to pay for everything.

Now there are various caveats having to do with out-of-network providers and the like, which I won’t get into here. Suffice to say that if I am fortunate enough to have a serious illness that doesn’t straddle two calendar years, the most my illnesses should cost me is about $4,400, allowing for my employer’s contribution. That may not seem like a lot of money to Joe Biden or Donald Trump, but in MY world, it’s close to a fortune. In fact, for most people, it’s a near-impossible hill to climb. If treatment for my illness started in December of one year and ended in, say, February of the next, I would be on the hook for at least twice that amount.

Part of the problem here has to do with how providers have structured costs around the private health insurance market. I’ve received a number of bills related to my hospitalization. The ambulance (a municipal ambulance, by the way) bill was $7,400. The hospitalization bill (minus charges from all of the medical personnel) came to $49,360. My portion of that last one is in excess of $5K, and I have yet to see a bill from my surgeon. Why does a four-day stay in a hospital (sans Doctors) plus some tests come to such a princely sum? It’s what the traffic will bear. You can see why rich people are fine with this system. It just doesn’t work for anyone else.

So, Joe Biden, what the fuck are you going to do about this broken system? And more broadly, Democratic party leadership, why are we patching this disaster with massive infusions of cash into COBRA plans when we could just be expanding Medicare/Medicaid to cover people who’ve lost their crappy employer coverage (and those who had none to begin with)?

You are going to need to be able to answer those questions if you want to win this year’s election … or at least minimally serve your constituents.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The expendables.

Sounds like a Bruce Willis movie from 1987, right? Well, it might as well be. The president appears to be okay with the notion of thousands upon thousands of us impaling ourselves on the altar of a boom economy; this after he left the door wide open to COVID-19, taking cues from the likes of Mick Mulvaney and John Bolton and other reactionary conservatives bent on shrinking the administrative state to a size that can be easily drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist was fond of saying back when he was relevant-ish. Congratulations, America! Guess what? You’re all warriors now! Time to take a bullet for President Little Lord Fauntleroy, whose idea of sacrifice is taking uncomfortable questions from a relatively supine White House Press Corps.

Seriously, does anyone want to die for Donald Trump? Does anyone want to sacrifice a parent, a sibling, a child, a grandchild, an aunt or uncle, a neighbor … anyone for the betterment of Trump’s political fortunes? Because make no mistake about it – COVID-19 kills, and there’s no telling who it will kill next. You might be spared … or you might not. We simply do not know this virus very well yet. If we listen to the President and some of these red state governors and force people back to work (on pain of losing their unemployment benefits), more and more people will get seriously ill, the hospitals will be quickly overwhelmed (particularly in more rural states, where there is even less excess capacity in terms of ICU beds), and thousands more will die. Judging by the degree to which people are avoiding those establishments that have reopened, I would say that most people understand this dynamic fairly well.

Of course, we all know who is particularly expendable in the minds of our leaders. Elderly people in nursing homes? They’re expected to die at regular intervals – this much I know from experience. But the true expendables are the folks who take the crappy jobs – the meat packers, the farm workers, the restaurant workers, etc. People of color, mostly, and a lot of women. They are being compelled to return to work because the establishments they work for are being told to start up again, or because their bosses are getting impatient, and practically none of these companies are inclined to invest in protection gear or protocols that would keep their workers safe and well. Wealthier, whiter knowledge workers can work from home, no problem. Meat packers, not so much. There’s a greenhouse in a neighboring county to where I live – they tested their employees for COVID and more than 100 of them were carrying it. That’s an enormous number in a rural area like this. Multiply that by thousands and you’ll get some idea of what we’re looking at.

Trump wants to keep the cheeseburgers rolling. Trouble is, when you force meatpackers back to work, it’s likely that they’ll get sick. And when they get sick, they can’t work, so you’re right back to where you started from. We can either address the public health problem, or we can expect a massive level of disruption from here on out. Up to us.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.