The Health Ministry in Gaza warned on 7 January that the medical sector in the strip is facing a disaster due to crippling shortages of essential supplies and humanitarian aid.
The ministry released a statement warning “of a real disaster that is sweeping hospitals, oxygen stations, medicine refrigerators, and nurseries in all health facilities remaining in operation in the Gaza Strip.”
“There is no fuel stock in hospitals due to the policy of dripping in fuel that the occupation has been following in bringing in since the beginning of the war on Gaza.
My book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It” was thrust into the spotlight recently, after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in what authorities say was a targeted attack outside the company’s annual investors conference. Investigators at the scene found bullet casings inscribed with the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose.”
The unsettling echo of the book’s title struck me and many others.
That killing – and the torrent of online outrage that followed – put Americans’ unhappiness with health insurers at the front of the national conversation.
Medical debt will be removed from consumer credit reports for all Americans under a final rule announced Tuesday by Vice President Kamala Harris. The rule will affect more than 15 million Americans, raising their credit scores by an estimated average of 20 points. No Americans will have medical debt listed on their credit report — down from approximately 46 million Americans who had this…
“Kamal Adwan Hospital is no more,” stated Dr. Mustafa Barghouti during a webinar organized by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) on December 28, 2024. As he spoke, reports of the latest Israeli attacks on the hospital were still emerging. These included the near-total destruction of its laboratory, storage, surgical units, and other critical facilities, alongside the arbitrary detention of its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.
The devastating outcome was all too predictable, given Israel’s systematic assaults on Gaza’s healthcare system during the ongoing genocide.
Whenever farmer Namdev Kamble visits a doctor, he remembers the hundreds of trees that once surrounded him. “We live in the same area today, but everything around us has changed completely,” he said in a voice heavy with nostalgia and loss. On his way to his farmland in Shirdhon village of India’s Maharashtra state, Kamble would see the giant tamarind, babul, neem, and several other types of…
Clinics offering ketamine infusions and injections for “treatment-resistant depression” are today claiming 24-48 hours remission, and ketamine is also being marketed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder.
“Between 500 and 750 ketamine clinics have cropped up across the United States,” NPR reported early in 2024 (“The Ketamine Economy: New Mental Health Clinics are a ‘Wild West’ with Few Rules”). This may be an underestimation, as Psychiatric News reported later in 2024, “More than 1,500 intravenous (IV) infusion clinics have proliferated nationwide.”
Providing care to people in need is usually seen as supremely humane and ethical. But look more closely and you’ll find that “care” is often a vehicle for self-serving social and political control. It’s often considered acceptable to withhold care from people who don’t have the “right” citizenship, skin color, cultural background, or gender identity, or who don’t have money to buy the care they need.
For an illuminating deep dive on the politics of care, check out a new book, Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press). I interviewed two of the co-authors.
In a New Orleans courtroom one afternoon this April, three federal appeals court judges questioned a lawyer for the country’s largest health insurance company. They wanted to know why United Healthcare had denied coverage for a 15-year-old girl named Emily Dwyer, whose anorexia had taken such a toll on her body that she had arrived at a residential treatment facility wearing her 8-year-old…
In the past two weeks, one thing has become crystal clear in America: the public outrage after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson exposed a seething fury over the health insurance racket. No amount of media finger-wagging at public perversity or partisan attempts to frame Luigi Mangione’s act as a statement from the left or right can hide the reality: the people, from all sides, are livid about the healthcare system—and with good reason.
In the 21st century, Americans have expressed their view that healthcare is deteriorating, not advancing.
In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in early December, some political observers were taken aback by the public response to the event, which included morbid humor and expressions of “Schadenfreude,” in the words of one woman who had battled an insurance company to secure treatment for her mother’s cancer. But according to a new poll released by NORC at the…
I was in Cuba (again) during the first week of December. I traveled with a delegation of members of the National Single Payer organization, which is working to achieve a national healthcare system in the US that would fully cover everyone under a single, comprehensive, government-funded program. We visited a variety of healthcare institutions in the cities of Havana and Matanzas, the capital of the province of the same name.
One of the most memorable interactions took place at the University of Medical Sciences in Matanzas. After receiving a presentation about the organization and curriculum by one of the leaders of the institution, I asked the assembled academic and clinical professors how many of them had participated in international medical missions.
My gastroenterologist gulped as he read the results of my colonoscopy. The images confirmed what I had already been told: A malignant tumor was blocking nearly the entire pathway of my colon. I could sense his guilt. After all, he had initially placed me on a two-month waiting list for the procedure — on top of the three months it had taken just to get an appointment with his office.
Popular representations of the Black Panthers often focus on their armed self-defense activities, but medical services and health justice were a tremendous part of the party’s work. This legacy continues today as Black activists work to transform the medical industrial complex and its relationship to the prison system. Erica Woodland (he/him), co-author of Healing Justice Lineages, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss this history, his current activism, and the role of The Real News’s own beloved Eddie Conway in influencing his path.
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Mansa Musa: Marshall Eddie Conway, former Black Panther and political prisoner, served approximately 44 years in captivity before he was released. While in prison, he and his wife, Dominque Conway, created a series of programs designed to raise prisoners’ consciousness. One program was Friend of a Friend. Friend of a Friend was a mentor program that taught prisoners critical thinking skills.
Throughout his imprisonment, Eddie Conway advocated for the liberation of all political prisoners and the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex. After his release in 2014, Eddie joined The Real News Network and started this very program, Rattling the Bars.
Recently I interviewed Baltimore native Erica Woodland, one of the many people influenced by Eddie Conway and Dominque Conway.
Welcome to Rattling the Bars, Erica.
Erica Woodland: Thank you for having me, Mansa. It’s good to see you.
Mansa Musa: All right, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and one of your latest projects.
Erica Woodland: Yeah, for sure. So I’m born, bred, and raised in Baltimore, East Baltimore, to be specific. And for the past 20 years, it’s been really an honor to be part of abolition work and liberatory harm reduction work, and work that’s really thinking about how to disrupt every single aspect of the way the criminal justice system disappears our communities.
And so I had the great pleasure of meeting Eddie Conway 20 years ago, and when we met, he immediately decided that I was going to be part [Musa laughs] of his liberation struggle — And you know Eddie, you can’t really tell him no. And also through organizing on behalf of his liberation and liberation of all political prisoners and being mentored by him and Dominque Conway, it really, as a young person, shaped the work that I’m doing now, which is primarily focused on Healing Justice.
And Healing Justice is a political and spiritual framework that helps to remind our people that, in addition to us liberating our minds and revolutionizing our consciousness, we have to also make sure that we’re taking care of people. So feeding people, making sure people have access to healthcare, making sure people have access to spaces for healing and collective grief.
And a lot of this work might sound familiar because it’s the work that the Black Panther Party was up to. But unfortunately in our movements now, a lot of that care and safety work has been forgotten, in part because the state has been extremely strategic and successful, in many ways, of co-opting our movements and then criminalizing our traditions.
So the project that I am spending a lot of my time with today is called Healing Justice Lineages. And so, it started off as an anthology, and I was able to contribute to this with my dear comrade Kara Page, who is one of the co-architects of this framework. But Healing Justice Lineages is an opportunity to tell the true lineage of this framework, which is actually having us think about what are the ways that historical and generational trauma are affecting our minds, our bodies, our spirits, our organizations, our revolutionary groups, and our ability to actually build power to get free, right?
Mansa Musa: Right.
Erica Woodland: So when you have communities that are highly traumatized, cut off from basic human needs, they’ve stolen our traditions — White people are selling our traditions back to us.
Mansa Musa: Right.
Erica Woodland: — And they’ve demonized our traditions. You have communities that are more easily surveilled and controlled and disappear.
And so the project has tried to map a lot of different voices and trying to bring up examples like, here are people who are doing liberation work, but also thinking about how do we feed people? How do we love up on people when they’ve experienced grief, loss, and violence?
But that project has led to a lot of other aspects, including a listening and cultural memory tour that we did in 2023. We went to seven cities across the country to actually lift up local work around healing justice and collective care and safety. And then we also did strategy sessions with organizers and practitioners in particular to say, what’s possible when you have health healing practitioners and organizers at the same table before we turn up on the state?
Mansa Musa: Right, right, right. And that’s a good observation, because me and Dominque talked about this oftentimes, about, as revolutionaries, we find ourselves in a space that we human, we made a decision to fight for our liberation, but in that, oftentimes, a lot of our emotions get wrapped up in that. And we look recognized that in the Black Panther Party — And our anniversary just passed — We recognized that, during that period, and which is a good observation on your part about the healing aspect of, is during that period they ain’t have no therapy. They ain’t have no, oh, this is trauma. They ain’t have no, oh, yeah, well, you an alcoholic, and it’s a result of the police wanting to kill you, or the police been locked you up seven times, and you been locked up, in the seven times you done spent a total of five years in and out of county jail. You ain’t have that then.
Now that particular aspect of the contradiction didn’t subsided, where the antagonism don’t exist because the formation is not in the same space. What do we do now? What do we do? But more importantly, the lessons learned and how do we pass it on? I think this is what you are telling us right now. That, OK, we need to be in this space right now because we ultimately going to have to turn it up.
Erica Woodland: Exactly.
Mansa Musa: And when we do turn it up, we want to be in a space where we don’t find ourselves so burned out that we become suicidal, even if it be in the form of substance use, it be in the form of spousal abuse, all the things that we oppose, if we don’t take and look at our mental health as it relates to our struggle. Talk about that.
Erica Woodland: Yeah. No, this is really important, and I also want to just name that I’m a therapist, but mostly my work is organizing therapists to understand their role as politicized. Because for me, the prison-industrial complex is actually deeply connected to the medical-industrial complex. And we saw that very clearly with Eddie’s experience at the end of his life. That you have social workers like me who are in positions where we’re actually facilitating the dissolution of families, where we are facilitating people experiencing psychiatric detention and psych hospitals.
And so, one of the things I want to bring attention to is I was able to interview Eddie for the book. And Eddie’s interview is a lot of people’s favorite, because what we know is that Eddie was willing to talk about things that a lot of other folks weren’t willing to talk about.
Mansa Musa: Right, right.
Erica Woodland: And so in this conversation… I’ve been talking to Eddie about trauma, probably our whole relationship, even if I didn’t use that language, because I want to understand what made it possible for him to survive those conditions and hold onto his humanity, when many, many people are out here and they have survived much less and they don’t have that same connection to their humanity.
So I’m always thinking about, where are the ways that we’re already knowing how to heal without an external person or professional? And what are the consequences of us not taking that work seriously? So therapy is one aspect, but we have traditions in Black community, the ways that we come together when we experience a loss, the way that we pour a little bit out for the homie that we lost to violence. That these are all things that are happening. But if we don’t understand trauma, then the state can exploit that.
And so in the interview, which is the chapter’s title, “Don’t Give Up and Don’t Make the Same Mistakes”, because one of the things I really appreciated about my relationship with Eddie is that he was very generous with his wisdom. He’s very generous about, here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, and here’s the things we did not think about because we didn’t have the language, we didn’t have the tools.
And the reality is when COINTELPRO came on the scene, it hadn’t existed before. It’s not like the Panthers had the knowledge, they didn’t have the playbook. They were writing the playbook down.
So one of the things that I’m committed to is documenting and preserving our political and spiritual traditions. Because disconnection from those traditions, that’s a tool of genocide. That’s essentially how the state continues to dominate and control our minds, first and foremost, and our radical imagination.
So that interview we got to talk about… You know, Eddie didn’t necessarily call his work healing justice, but I’m like, I wouldn’t even be talking about healing justice if it wasn’t for the Black Panther Party and their commitment to making sure our people were well. To making sure that we preserved our dignity and wholeness, and to say, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with these conditions, and we actually have to build power to change the conditions. We don’t heal just to heal. That’s cute, but I don’t want to heal, I don’t want to learn how to cope with this, I want to actually figure out how we change this, because it’s unacceptable.
Mansa Musa: And you know what I was thinking about what you were saying when you were saying how you title the chapter of Eddie and “Don’t Give Up”. Because me and him did a lot of time together, we was incarcerated together. And he was my mentor. And I used to always joke about him having gray hairs, and I would say 80% of them gray hairs in his head I put it in there myself, from him dealing with me.
But in terms of how you articulate his outlook, that’s just how it was. I recall when I hadn’t seen him for a while, we wound up in an institution together, now JCI, and he said, man, let’s go up to the library and talk. So we made a schedule, we would go to the library once a week and talk. And I didn’t think too much of it at the time. I hadn’t seen you in a while, so we just catching up. But as we talking, we’re talking about events. We’re talking about stuff that’s going on around the world. We’re talking about what I’ve been doing. We’re talking about what he’s doing.
And then it got to a point where he said, we was getting ready to bring friends of the friends in. It got to a point where he said like, yeah, well, we don’t have to come to the library no more, and we getting ready to do this with this group. And the reason why I had you come up here is because I wanted to see where your thinking was at. Because I didn’t come in contact with a lot of people in the system that started out a certain way, but as time went on, their thinking didn’t evolve. They regressed, and they abandoned any politics, they abandoned any instinct to survive, they just allowed themselves mentally to accept where they was at.
And he say, and he was telling me, he said, well, that ain’t you. And I was like, man, what you think? You the one that educated me. So I’m a product of this education in terms of, like you said, we didn’t say trauma, we didn’t say healing. If something went on. This is what we did.
And I think that, and I want you to speak on this, how you unpack that within the community. Because traditionally we always done that. And traditionally we don’t call it, we don’t give it no clinical definition. This is what we did. This is our nature, to be there for each other. What happened?
Erica Woodland: A lot of things happened [Musa laughs]. So this is a great way to bring in the medical-industrial complex, which includes, obviously, hospitals, health clinics, doctors, nurses. But it’s a broader system that includes pharmaceutical companies. And that’s basically a for-profit system that is trying to surveil, control us, and preserve the life of certain people, primarily white men of wealth, and to exterminate or extract labor from the rest of us.
So part of what happened is, you take people, even if you just think about the attempted genocide against Indigenous people on this land. They literally cut you off. They put you in a residential boarding school, cut you off from your language, cut you off… I mean, this happened to Black Americans, too. But I want to just make that connection because I think we forget. And all of these things we innately know how to do, they turn you against them. They tell you that is uncivilized. That’s not the way to do it.
Then you bring in somebody who’s deemed professional. So, I have what one of my comrades called colonial credentials. So I’m a licensed clinical social worker. I didn’t get that license to be an arm of the state, I got that to be able to disrupt and understand how the state is working through things like social work and therapy and the mental health system. So I’m a professional, so I get told I’m legitimate. You’re allowed to work with survivors, you’re allowed to do all this healing work.
Meanwhile, this work is happening not paid. People aren’t getting support in community all the time because the vast majority of marginalized people’s mental health support comes from their friends, it comes from their family members, comes from their homies. Most people don’t have access to therapy. And those therapeutic interventions weren’t designed for us. They were designed to control us.
So one of the things that I do in my work in my organization is we really disrupt that. So we organize mental health practitioners — And that includes people like me who are licensed, but it includes all the other people who are attending to the emotional and spiritual well-being, specifically in my work of queer and trans people of color. So we don’t prioritize my training over the actual lived experience, but you’re getting on-the-job training. Actually, nobody trains you at all. You’re self-taught. You’re taught by community.
But those relationships is what the state has tried to disrupt. So we wouldn’t need a whole… Nothing’s wrong with therapy. I think therapy is actually a great tool, but it’s not a cure-all. But we wouldn’t actually need therapists in the same way if our siblings and our family members who were behind these walls were home, if we had food, if the air we were breathing was not toxic. If we actually restored our ability to be in right relationship with the land and every other being that we have to be on this planet with, we wouldn’t have this kind of trauma.
It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t suffer. But what we’re seeing at this point, at this scale, especially with the genocides happening across the globe, is this is unnecessary, manufactured suffering. And if we don’t understand how it’s affecting not just the way we treat each other, but how are you going to strategize? How are you going to make a strategy that’s actually going to work when you are highly traumatized? And the ways that you’re attempting to heal, the state is saying, oh, you have a substance abuse problem? You’re getting locked up. Oh, you are hallucinating, for instance. We’re going to lock you up in a psychiatric facility and potentially give you forced treatment — Not potentially, give you forced treatment that then takes away your rights the same way that happens when you’re incarcerated.
So it’s a setup and it’s a scam, but I think there’s a growing conversation in the communities that I’m in of Black and Brown people who are like, we are going to figure out how these systems work, to tear them down, and to abolish them. And we’re also going to create alternatives because that’s what we need.
So that story you just told about Eddie sitting with you weekly, I was like, that was therapy.
Mansa Musa: Exactly.
Erica Woodland: That was you having human to human connection. That was also a vetting. I keep that. I’m like, we need to bring vetting back. I just had a conversation about that earlier. I’m like, we just out here trusting people that have not demonstrated that they’re trustworthy with the kind of liberation work that we’re talking about.
Mansa Musa: And that’s a good segue to talk about Eddie, but I wanted to unpack that a little bit more. Because right now you have trauma, and they starting to monetize trauma, saying trauma, resilience, and define it, [inaudible] and everybody and their mother coming around with an approach. But at the same token, it’s the same old story and the same old song. It’s just a different band playing it.
But speaking of Eddie, so let’s talk about the campaign to exonerate Eddie. And for the benefit of our viewers, this is one of the posters that was put out by some college students in conjunction with myself, Erica, and Dominque comrade, and some other comrade that’s advocating for Eddie to be exonerated. Speak on why do you think that Eddie’s been transitioned? Why is it important that, in your mind, or that our audience should want to know, that we should try to have Eddie exonerated? He’s gone, he was out, he lived his life, and he lived his life to his fullest, or what was left of it.
Erica Woodland: Right. This is a really good question and I think it ties into a lot of the archival work that I’ve been a part of over the past three years, that we have to hold on to the truth of Eddie’s life, Eddie’s work, and what the state did to Eddie. There has been no redress. Eddie’s name has not been cleared, and Eddie was innocent.
So one of the things that, it happens with a lot of revolutionaries, we’ve seen it many times, is the sanitization of their actual work. And there’s a way that we all then kind of forget. You could actually make this sound like some kind of happy story in the end. Oh look, this person, wrongfully convicted. Well, they got out [Musa laughs] in the end of their life, they were able to do this, that and the third. No, let’s go back to the fact that this person literally did almost 44 years for their political work, and they were targeted by the state. And that is happening now.
Mansa Musa: Exactly.
Erica Woodland: So to me, part of the campaign is about telling the truth. That is always, to me, a healing act. To tell the truth of what actually happened, to move with the knowing that this was a wrongdoing. And if we do not prioritize the exoneration of Eddie and all political prisoners, then when this… Political prisoners are being manufactured right now.
Mansa Musa: That’s right.
Erica Woodland: They’re being manufactured right now.
Mansa Musa: That’s right.
Erica Woodland: Young people are political prisoners right now. So this is part of a larger struggle to combat state repression. And I think spiritually it’s also really important to preserve Eddie’s legacy by telling the truth. And then it’s also really important to think about how that supports our generational healing, our healing as a community. Somebody who did nothing but sacrifice on our behalf, and we’re going to let the state continue to lie? We’re going to let the state continue to try to manipulate the story of what really happened.
Mansa Musa: When me and Dominque was having this conversation and we decided like, well, this is something that we want to look at. And we start organizing, got some of the supporters together and start talking about it. Everybody had the same perspective, just like you said, it is about we want to be able to say, like you say, tell the truth. And it’s important that we tell the truth about what happened to Geronimo Pratt, what happened to Fred Hampton, what happened to Malcolm. That because of their political views and their aspiration to be free, that they was targeted and set up and, in most cases, assassinated or died a death of a thousand cuts.
And they did the same thing with Eddie. And only for no reason other than the fact that he believed in his right to self-determination. He believed that he had a right to be treated as a human being. He had a right to our people being free.
Talk about where we at in terms of some of the things that we’re doing with the campaign, for the benefit of our viewers and listeners.
Erica Woodland: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re doing a couple of things. We currently have a petition and a website, which is at marshalleddieconway.com where you can get information about Eddie’s case and why exoneration is so important. But you can also sign the petition so that we can actually put some pressure on Gov. Wes Moore to move forward with this exoneration.
Part of what we’re also doing with the website and with some filmmakers is to help to document more of Eddie’s story, in particular how we build a case for exoneration and why that’s so important, I think, to Baltimore City in particular. The history, the legacy, the revolutionary lineage here, I only know about that because of Eddie. And so this is part of a larger effort to get Eddie’s story out so we can have redress and justice in this situation, as much justice as you can have with how much harm and violence the state has engaged in towards Eddie. But this campaign is really, really important.
And so, I know we’re also doing some things coming up in 2025 to help honor Eddie’s legacy around his birthday in April. So there’ll be more information about that. I’m sure you’ll get the word out, Mansa.
Mansa Musa: Yeah, most definitely.
Erica Woodland: But right now we need people to educate themselves and to sign the petition and get the word out.
Mansa Musa: And we was real strategic in making sure that all this information that’s coming out about Eddie is not being repackaged for the benefit of changing the narrative or minimizing his contribution. We was real mindful to make sure that the social media that have any representation of Eddie is authorized by us. To ensure that the truth — Because it’s all about the truth.
And in this case, it might sound cliché, but they say the truth will set you free. What we talking about, the freedom of the truth setting Eddie free in terms of him being recognized for the person that he was and the impact that he had on people that exists today. Whenever anybody come in contact with Eddie, even to this day, they make the observation that the impact that he had on them, how he was able to tap into their thinking, how he was able to get them to maximize on their potential.
And this is something that we want to make sure that people understand. That had he not been set up, had charges [not been] fabricated against him, no telling what he would have done. And he done a lot while he was incarcerated, while he was on the plantation. But no telling what he would’ve done.
And I want to go back to your point. Political prisoners, young people right now are being manufactured to be political prisoners. And as we move forward in this country, it is going to come a time where they going to be like 1984. Like your thoughts, literally going to be the law saying, if you think this way and then you going to be charged with being a terrorist or whatever.
But as we close out, Erica, tell people how they can get the book and where we at in terms of the exoneration.
Erica Woodland: Absolutely. So again, if you want more information about the exoneration campaign, that’s at marshalleddieconway.com. And then if you want any information about the Healing Justice Lineages project, we’re at healingjusticelineages.com. And we have a digital archive that we’re building out there so you can hear more voices about the work.
Mansa Musa: All right, and you got the last word on this subject matter. What you want to tell our viewers and our audience as you rattle the bars?
Erica Woodland: I appreciate the last word. I neglected to say, the work that we’re doing right now around Eddie’s legacy is also about getting ahead of and interrupting co-optation. And there’s a lot of co-optation that happens here in Baltimore City. It happens everywhere. But there’s a particular way that people like to manipulate the story of revolutionaries to actually fuel work that is deeply harmful to Black people. And so, I just wanted to end on that. That we actually need to be very clear about we’re protecting Eddie’s work and Eddie’s lineage because it deserves that much. And co-optation is a tool of the state. And even if our own people are doing it, it’s unacceptable.
Mansa Musa: There you have it. The Real News round about. Erica, you rattled the bars today. And I’m reminded of what you just say. Dominque reminds us that she owns… She don’t own Eddie, but she’s not going to let nobody co-opt the narrative or taking change who he was. And this is something important that we must always be mindful of, that we should never let people continue to define us, tell us who we are, what we are, and what we’re doing, and then give us some money to accept that what you just said about me is acceptable because I’m getting paid. No. Our legacy, our image, our heritage is not for sale.
There you have it. And we ask you to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. It’s only on Real News and Rattling the Bars that you get this kind of information. That we have a professional therapist. We don’t have a professional clinical therapist that’s certified by the state and recognize their state credential. We got somebody certified by the people and recognize their people credentials, which is way more important than any credentials that they can get, even though they do have the documentation that the state say they should have. But in terms of their application and practice, it’s all about the people.
Thank you, Erica. Continue to rattle the bars, and we ask you to continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. Because guess what? We really are the news.
New enrollments under the Affordable Care Act are on pace to trail last year’s record numbers by as many as a million as the outgoing Biden administration confronts upheavals in the program. Donald Trump’s election to a second term has cast uncertainty around the future of the health law. In addition, the Biden administration implemented cumbersome policies to reduce fraudulent enrollment and…
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In forming a response to this outrageous oppression would you tell this monster that the next time he breaks into your home with his fists balled he’s going to have to forgo one of the shots he takes at people – say, the head smacks.
Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted overwhelmingly in April to join the United Auto Workers, a landmark win for labor organizing in the South. The region has suffered deeply because of its low-road, anti-union economic model. Seven out of ten states with the highest levels of poverty are in the South, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
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Amid an outpouring of frustration with for-profit health insurance sparked by the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, much of the media coverage has focused on the alleged shooter, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, and the industry’s nasty habit of maximizing profits by denying claims and leaving sick and vulnerable patients with massive medical bills.
There’s plenty of data to back up the anger over private health plans expressed online since the shooting. Insurance costs are far outpacing inflation, leaving patients with soaring out-of-pocket costs.
Amid an outpouring of frustration with for-profit health insurance sparked by the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, much of the media coverage has focused on the alleged shooter, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, and the industry’s nasty habit of maximizing profits by denying claims and leaving sick and vulnerable patients with massive medical bills.
America’s largest health insurers have raked in more than $371 billion in profits since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, according to financial data reviewed by The Lever. More than 40 percent of that net income went to UnitedHealth Group, whose annual profits have skyrocketed by nearly 400 percent as the company now reportedly denies nearly one in three medical claims from its…
The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has gripped the nation and revived a passionate debate on the dismal state of healthcare in the US. With suspect Luigi Mangione now in custody, the police manhunt is over—but the real political fallout may have only just begun. In this special edition of Inequality Watch, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis react to the media’s response to the killing, and also speak with Kat Abughazaleh of Mother Jones, Prem Thakker of Zeteo, and activist Jeff Singer on the predatory nature of the US healthcare system.
Produced by: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham Technical Director: Cameron Granadino Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden Written by: Stephen Janis
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to a special breaking news edition of the Inequality Watch, our show that seeks to analyze, comprehend, and seek solutions for the existential threat of unjustly concentrated wealth. Now I’m calling this a breaking news edition because of the events that transpired late last week. I’m sure most of you already know. UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson was gunned down on Thursday while arriving at a midtown Manhattan Hotel by a mass man who police now allege was Luigi Mangione. Now, Mangione was arrested earlier this week in McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He has been charged with a crime of second degree murder. Police found a manifesto on him critical of our unequal American healthcare system. But while Mangione is fighting extradition from a Pennsylvania jail, the murder has prompted massive fallout on social media that has launched a different conversation altogether, namely the company where Thompson worked and its role in the healthcare of millions of Americans, UnitedHealthcare and beyond that, the obvious cruelty of a system predicated on denying care and pursuit of profit.
Now, first I do want to be clear, violence is not the solution to any problem, let alone our dysfunctional healthcare system. And we do not condone or in any way think the problems we’re about to discuss justify violence. However, the job of independent media is to drill down into these issues that are often given superficial coverage by our mainstream media brethren. So we cannot ignore the outpouring of criticism about UnitedHealthcare’s business practices that have accompanied this event. It is a wave of pain and sorrow about a system that regularly denies the care people need, and a system predicated on profit that often fails to achieve the goal of the most expensive healthcare system in the world, treating people with dignity and improving their lives. And also, we want to know what you think about our callous healthcare industry and what you’ve learned about it from firsthand experience and what if anything you think can be done to fix it.
So please let us know your thoughts in the chat and comments, and I’ll try to get to some of them as well as to those who took the time to comment on our YouTube community post. I’ll make sure to show some of those comments at the end of our discussion. And one other point I want to make before we get started, this broken system has nothing to do with the people who deliver our healthcare. There are nurses and doctors and physical therapists and specialists of all kinds who do heroic work daily, and we all appreciate their dedication. I mean, just remember the critical care workers who stayed on the job during the pandemic to take care of patients under horrible conditions and many actually gave their lives to save ours. So first, we’re going to discuss the public reaction and then provide some context as to how the American Health Insurance operates, and we’ll share facts and figures to reveal why America pays more for healthcare than any other country and why that massive financial commitment leads to less than stellar results.
Then we’ll talk to Jeff Singer, the former executive director of Healthcare for the Homeless, a Baltimore-based nonprofit that provides health services to the people who can least afford them, and he has been fighting for healthcare justice and equity for decades. And then we’ll be discussing the massive online response and the mainstream media elites with two people who can analyze it better than any journalist out there, namely Kat Abu of Mother Jones and Prem Thakker of eo. So we have got a great discussion for you today, but first I want to go to my reporting partner, Stephen. Janice, just to set the stage. I want to play some clips just before we get started. And these clips flooded TikTok and other social media apps after Thompson’s killing. Let’s take a look.
Speaker 2:
UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, fatally shot and mute. No, let me fix that for you. Greedy man who siphoned $10 million a year from sick and poor people who was the CEO of the health insurance company that denied the most claims while simultaneously being number four on the Fortune 500 list was clapped today in New York City.
Speaker 3:
I’m going to be honest with y’all, defend, deny, depose sounds a whole hell of a lot like Liberte egalite for eternity, which was the battle cry for the French Revolution. Do not be surprised if we start seeing defend, deny depose spray painted on buildings.
Speaker 4:
I think that this guy is going to be this generation’s DB Cooper. They are just never going to find him. He’s going to turn into an urban legend. He knew exactly what he was doing and he disappeared immediately. And the best part about all this is that he drastically amplified class solidarity because no matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala, a lot of people are agreeing that insurance agencies are some of the most predatory companies out there. You pay into them for your entire adult life. And then they deny 32% of claims that could have been for lifesaving care that probably resulted in the suspect’s loved ones or family members passing away unnecessarily.
Speaker 5:
So I got a question for you. If they catch this person who un alive the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, if they catch this guy, how big you think the GoFundMe is going to be for his legal defense? I mean, I’m just curious because I know a lot of people I bet who throw $10 at this guy’s legal defense because I think the American public is just fed up with all these rich pricks, especially in the healthcare industry where they’ve been over the middle class in the working class since way before I was even born.
Speaker 6:
Hey, if you’re an electric bike backpack and firearm enthusiast who happen to be hanging outside a certain hotel in New York City this morning and you’re looking for a place to lay low, I got you. Send me a message. I’ll come pick you up at the time and location most convenient for you, and you can crash here as long as you need. Drinks are obviously on me, but honestly, so is everything else. Food, clothing, whatever you need, your money is no good here.
Taya Graham:
So that young man was actually talking about providing an underground railroad for Luigi Mangione, and I just want to mention I do keep my eye on the live chat. I noticed sth, Lord Prince said that it’s corrupt, not broken. That’s just me. And FPV Frodo said, everyone must stop paying all medical bills until the insurance companies come to their sense, it must be unanimous. Let’s stop paying all medical bills. Now, Stephen, I just want to get your thoughts about the outpouring of anger regarding our healthcare industry.
Stephen Janis:
What astounded me when I watched some of the outpouring after this was that we had talked about consistently why aren’t the Democrats or why isn’t healthcare an issue in the presidential campaign? It really didn’t come up. And then you see the universal passion for the problems with this healthcare system. I was just kicking myself because I’m like this great consulting campaign that we just watched, which was funded by over a billion dollars, never thought that maybe people care about this issue. So to me, in many ways it showed how the Democrats have lost touch with the working class. And I know this has been a point that many people have made over and over again, but still it’s really almost like, what were you guys thinking? Were you listening? And then to watch Josh Shapiro, who’s the governor of Pennsylvania during a press conference after the young man was caught scolding people for two or three minutes about the moralizing, about saying, how can you bring this up in this context? Well, you didn’t listen before. You don’t listen at all. And if you don’t listen, people get angry and they find other ways to express it. And I think the shock of the democratic elites and the consultants that avoid this were probably the biggest thing that just struck me right away.
Taya Graham:
Stephen, to your point, while I was watching this, I couldn’t help but wonder why this issue didn’t engender much discussion during the campaign. It made me think about our previous discussion regarding billionaires, specifically the group that we called conflict
Speaker 8:
Billionaires,
Taya Graham:
Which are the uber wealthy who profit off dividing us with their social media companies. And it really seems like this applies to the issue, especially because despite the anger we’re seeing now, neither party campaigned on the issue. I mean, Stephen, what do you think?
Stephen Janis:
Well, on the inequality watching is the Real News Network. We try to give people a handy guide to identify billionaires in the wild,
Taya Graham:
Right?
Stephen Janis:
So we had the carbon conflict and the conflict billionaires are the ones who make money off getting us to hate each other, and basically profit people who own social media platforms like El Musk, Elon Musk, and let’s remember Elon Musk probably doesn’t have a copay when he goes to the doctor. And I don’t think Elon Musk has to worry about his healthcare. Well, I mean, come on, that’s a fair point. And then he’s on Twitter making us all hate each other while we’re sitting there with this horrible healthcare system that doesn’t really serve us. And I think the absurdity of it is apparent to the people out to live with it, but none of these conflict billionaires have to live with it, so they don’t care about it. And so they sort of construct arguments between each other instead of actually paying attention to the problem, which they don’t have to worry about it. Elon Musk can pay his medical
Speaker 8:
Bills.
Stephen Janis:
He doesn’t have to worry about it. So I just thought conflict billionaires, this is a perfect example of how they keep an important issue out of the public forum and discussion.
Taya Graham:
As a matter of fact, I think you could probably help out with everyone’s medical bills actually, but just
Speaker 8:
About
Taya Graham:
Not to be callous
Speaker 8:
Though, true,
Taya Graham:
But just to put your thoughts in perspective, let’s provide some context on how the Uber rich get richer as we get sicker. And so I’m going to just throw some numbers on the screen. So private health insurance spends more money administering healthcare than Medicare, and this is multiple times more expensive. Administration costs about 2% for Medicare versus 12 to 20% for private health insurers. Now, the CBO estimates that we could save roughly 500 billion annually with Medicare for all. The United States will spend a projected $4.7 trillion or 18% of the national economy on healthcare in 2023. On a per capita basis, United States spends nearly double the average of similarly wealthy countries. Nonetheless, health outcomes are generally no better than those of other countries, and in some cases are worse, including in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality, and diabetes. Now, United Healthcare Group is the umbrella company that Mr. Thompson worked for, and it shows just how profitable this system is. The company has earned nearly 30 billion over the past four quarters. So there is no doubt that this system is making people rich.
Stephen Janis:
Can we make one quick point? Sure. It’s really interesting is the A a, the Obamacare actually limited the amount of money that an insurance company could spend on administration, but what they did is they bought other healthcare concerns so they could overcome that. That 20% is kind of meaningless now because these bigger companies are buying pharmacy benefit managers. So it just shows why people are frustrated even when legislation has passed to limit their profitability, they find ways around it. I just wanted add that.
Taya Graham:
No, that’s an excellent point. And I found this graphic to emphasize how profitable this company is and how profitable the industry is. So lemme just throw just one more graphic on the screen.
Speaker 8:
Okay, one more.
Taya Graham:
Okay. So this is a list of the Fortune 500. Number one on the list is Walmart. Number two is Amazon. Number three is Apple. And number four on the Fortune 500 is the United Healthcare Group. United Healthcare Group is the parent company of United Healthcare, and it’s on the Fortune 500 list. And in fact, if you take a look at the bottom, they’re making more money than ExxonMobil. Okay. So how is that for the tip of the iceberg in terms of how bad healthcare is good for a very wealthy few, but we are very lucky to have someone help us sort through this, namely Jeff Singer who spent his entire career fighting to deliver healthcare to the people who can least afford it. He’s the former executive director of Healthcare for the homeless in Baltimore City, our hometown, and he’s been the advocate for affordable dignified healthcare for decades, and his activism extends to a variety of topics, including affordable housing, living wages, and law enforcement reform. Professor singer, Jeff, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. So I’m having a little trouble hearing Jeff,
Stephen Janis:
But why don’t you ask him the first question,
Taya Graham:
But I’m going to go ahead and ask him the first question in the hopes that he’ll hear me shortly. So Jeff, first, you were surprised by the response to, were you surprised by the response to the killing of CEO Thompson? I mean, you’ve seen some of the worst aspects of this system. So what were your thoughts when you saw how people were reacting to crime when you saw how the public was responding? Oh gosh. It looks like I’m still not hearing Jeff. That’s unfortunate.
Speaker 8:
Yeah,
Taya Graham:
Well, oh, he can hear me now. Okay, great. Hi, professor Singer. Can you hear me?
Jeff Singer:
I can.
Taya Graham:
Okay, terrific. Terrific. So I gave you, I know you didn’t hear me, but I gave you a glowing introduction and told everyone out there how much we appreciate you and how you are literally an institution in Baltimore for the activism that you have engaged in over the decades. So I just want to ask you our first question,
Speaker 8:
Which
Taya Graham:
Was if you were surprised by the public’s response to the killing of CEO Thompson, because like I was saying before, you have seen some of the most cruel aspects of this system firsthand. So what were your thoughts when people were reacting and responding to his murder?
Jeff Singer:
I was pleased that there was such an outpouring of political and political economic analysis. So yeah, that’s what we used to call propaganda by the deed, and haven’t seen too much of that in this country in a long time.
Stephen Janis:
Jeff, why do you think politicians took such a, they didn’t really want to engage in the discussion about healthcare. They wanted to shame people for this outpouring of anger. Why were they so reluctant to speak to the people about it and not engage with people rather than kind of say scold people for responding to this?
Jeff Singer:
Right. The mainstream media has been its usual heedless self, and there’s been very little analysis of what any of this means, particularly in Baltimore, the mainstream media here, the sun and the banner. There’s just, and the governor who just announced that, of course he isn’t in favor of violence. Well, yeah, we kind of knew that, although that remains to be seen, but that’s true throughout American society, that nobody’s in favor of violence and the people in power aren’t in favor of doing anything about it
Stephen Janis:
In the sense of doing anything about the healthcare system. You had another question. I’m sorry.
Taya Graham:
Oh, well, professor Singer, I was hoping that you could help us by maybe unpacking some of the myths regarding Medicare for all. I mean, there are a lot of falsehoods out there. The idea that Medicare for All or universal healthcare would be, let’s say even a form of socialism. What are some of the falsehoods people believe and what is the truth?
Jeff Singer:
Yes. Well, only if were a form of socialism, but it isn’t necessarily, that’s one of the ways that the ruling class tricks people into not working for what they want and for what they need by using the derogatory form of socialism that of course, all good Americans are supposed to be opposed to. And they’ve been very successful with that for 150 years.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. We were talking before the show with our esteemed editor in Chief Max Alvarez and a couple other people who have had access to nationalized healthcare. He was in England, he said, that was amazing.
Speaker 8:
Yes.
Stephen Janis:
Why have our politicians been successful in scaring people about a nationalized health system? It seems like it makes total common sense, but on the other hand, we have this sort of running through that we all like our private insurance or whatever. Why have they been so easily able to tarnish the idea of a national healthcare system?
Jeff Singer:
I don’t precisely know the answer to that, but as I mentioned, there’s been almost 150 years of negativity around the term socialism. Although nationalized health insurance isn’t really a socialist solution. On the other hand, England has had socialized medicine since World War ii.
Speaker 8:
It’s
Jeff Singer:
Very, very popular and it’s very, very effective. The Commonwealth Foundation released a report a few months ago called Mirror Mirror, and it evaluates the healthcare situation in 10 countries, 10 advanced industrial countries,
Ben Shapiro:
And
Jeff Singer:
One that spends the most and has the worst outcomes is of course, the United States.
Speaker 8:
Right.
Jeff Singer:
Number three in their analysis is the United Kingdom, which is socialized medicine.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. I mean, technically speaking, Medicare is socialized medicine. I mean, technically speaking by definition, right? Medicare.
Jeff Singer:
Well, Medicare though paid private providers.
Stephen Janis:
Well, there’s a Medicare advantage, but then there is a Medicare system that doesn’t, right. Or I guess you’re right, they’re providers. So yeah, I see what you’re saying. That’s very distinct. They don’t have private providers in England or other countries. You’re right.
Jeff Singer:
Very few in the United Kingdom. Now, other countries like Germany and France, they do have private providers, but treated pretty differently than they are here.
Taya Graham:
Jeff, I wanted to ask you something just so that you could speak from your personal experience. I mean, you have really dealt with a system that denies healthcare for poor people or for people who can’t afford housing, and you actually did something about it by helping build healthcare for the homeless. What did you see and experience trying to get people who are left out of our system and denied by it?
Jeff Singer:
Well, it’s interesting Teya that most of the people with whom we worked, and that was, well, a hundred thousand different people that we worked with for 25 years at healthcare for the homeless then, and that was 15 years ago. So there’s more now, but they were and are people who have not had access to health services, which exacerbates all their health problems. So they can’t take advantage of the wonderful possibility of advanced health services that the United States does have. But it benefits a small number of people.
Stephen Janis:
And you’re in the process. You were working, we talked about the administrative costs in our private health insurance. How much was that administrative state a problem in terms of delivering healthcare because it’s so expensive and sort of usy, how much was that a problem for you to deal with?
Jeff Singer:
Well, we were required financially speaking to become integrated into the existing health system. And that is complicated and expensive. There’s lots of reporting that has to happen, and computer systems. We had spent a lot of money building, buying computer systems. People spend a lot of time using the systems that exist, and a lot of that is unnecessary. Not all of it, but a lot of it is, there’s a huge amount of money that is wasted on those systems.
Taya Graham:
I wanted to ask just about some of the lessons that you’ve learned from doing healthcare at such a grassroots level that maybe we could learn from to help us push for a more comprehensive healthcare plan. I mean, is there a way to change this system and perhaps you could share with us some of your ideas to do so
Jeff Singer:
Aside from having a socialist revolution?
Stephen Janis:
No, you can talk about that
Jeff Singer:
Until we do that I don’t think will have an equitable and effective healthcare system. But there are non socialist countries that have much better healthcare systems or a lot more equity for sure. And higher life expectancy and lower morbidity. So all of the data shows that when everybody has access to decent healthcare, everybody benefits not just their health but their pocketbooks. It is so much cheaper to make sure that everybody gets good preventive care, and maybe that’ll happen with our new health secretary.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Well, I want to ask you, if you’re organizing a ground this idea, what is the biggest roadblock to, I mean, there’s a million of them, okay. I mean the political system we have now, who’s in power, but is it like entrenched special interests like the A MA or something? What makes it impossible to even have this conversation? Or is it propaganda? I mean, just curious what you think.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah. Well, the A MA has been involved in assuring that there isn’t equitable healthcare for many, many since there was an A MA every time a national figure would advocate for healthcare for all, not necessarily Medicare for all. That’s one example. But the A MA would spend as much money as they could, and that’s a lot of money to make sure that the discussion isn’t a real one. That people are tarred and feathered when they talk about socialized medicine or when they talk about healthcare for all. And it is unfortunate that so much time and money is spent on making sure that we don’t have the system. Well, that’s
Stephen Janis:
Amazing.
Jeff Singer:
We spend twice as much as any other country, and yet our health outcomes are the worst among advanced industrial countries.
Taya Graham:
Jeff, I wanted to ask you a question. I had been looking, I was on open secrets and they do great work. If you ever want to find out what your local politician is receiving in their campaign coffers, go take a look. You’ll see, and I was looking and I saw that there was a lot of donations from the healthcare industry, and in particular, I was looking at the United Health Group and Vice President Harris received a large sum of money, actually even larger than the sum of money President-elect Trump received. But there was plenty of money sloshing about both with Democrats and Republicans. And I was wondering, I mean on your thoughts of how many layers do we have to unpack here? I mean, if our politicians are, let’s say, being influenced by this money, I mean, can you give us some suggestions on how we can start taking this power?
Jeff Singer:
I wish I could effectively do that because the health industry is one of the largest and most profitable in the US, and they spend more money on lobbying than anyone else except maybe the oil industry. I don’t know. I haven’t seen the figures recently. But because so much money is spent on maintaining this system, that does not work well for most people in this country. But that’s backed up by the propaganda, as you said, Stephen, they reinforce each other. The industry, I mean, there’s billions. Hundreds of billions of dollars are made by these profiteers. And until that gets addressed, nothing changes. Right? Well, who supports that? Some nice people do, but not the captains of industry because that’s how they have their three houses and jaguars. So they’re going to do whatever they can to assure that real changes don’t happen. Obamacare, that’s not a real change that didn’t in any way interfere with the privatization and financialization of health.
Taya Graham:
Well, professor, lemme just ask you one last question before we bring on our guest Kat and Prem. I mean, I am starting to think here, we just, I’m getting the impression from you that perhaps Professor, we might just need a revolution. I mean, is it time for us to just start getting in the streets and protesting and ringing our Congress people? I mean, is it time for us
Stephen Janis:
To folks have a revolution on
Taya Graham:
YouTube? Well really take action and pushing our politicians to do what we want, which is reform the system.
Jeff Singer:
Yeah. Well, my old friend Gil Scott Heron famous, said that the revolution will not be televised, but it might be on YouTube. Yeah,
Speaker 8:
It could be. Well,
Jeff Singer:
This could be a time when some changes will happen. And that’s exciting about the reaction to this event.
Taya Graham:
Thank Well, professor Singer, thank you so much for your time. And I want to quote of that, the revolution might not be televised, but it might be on YouTube. That makes a lot of sense. I need that.
Stephen Janis:
I
Taya Graham:
Need that t-shirt right now.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you, professor. We
Taya Graham:
Appreciate it, professor, singer, it’s always so great to see you. We really appreciate you.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Jeff Singer:
Yes. Delightful to speak with you all.
Ben Shapiro:
Thank
Taya Graham:
You. And we also really appreciate the service he has done for our community, both as an educator and a healthcare provider.
Stephen Janis:
Listening to him, it’s like we had talked about the political economy, which is when sort of politics and business fuse. And I feel like we’re in this huge glacier of political economy that seems immovable at this point, but we’re not going to give a pope. But still, it’s a pretty solid sort of fusion between business interests and the government in this case. And that makes it, I think, pretty hard for us to have real change. But we got to keep talking about it.
Taya Graham:
And I just want to throw up a few. I’ve been keeping the
Stephen Janis:
Island, which just might becomes irrational, but No, but seriously, it’s why people react to a murder and with glee and everyone’s like, why would this happen? It’s because the system is completely immovable. It doesn’t respond to people’s needs. And when democracy becomes incapable of responding to people’s needs, people respond in other ways. I mean, just listening to it just, anyway.
Taya Graham:
No, Stephen, you make a very fair point and there’s some really great comments in the chat. And I just want to throw a few on screen before I bring on our guests. Bud. Roland said, the CEO shooter appears to be connected to the radical middle. We have, I know they have some great comments here. A Ophelia Moon Monroe said that I think if Luigi goes to trial, they’re going to have to stack the jury to get a guilty verdict. They don’t stack it. They will stack it. Don’t be fooled.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you, Ophelia.
Taya Graham:
And let’s see this person Anon Mouse. Good to see you again. Anon Mouse. It says, heart attack stent installed with insurance, $74,000 heart attack stent installed without insurance. $198,000.
Stephen Janis:
So to pay $74,000.
Taya Graham:
Yeah, that’s horrifying. And I just want to also to acknowledge Dre with without, it’s very weird that we, the people have to be nice about someone who knowingly profits from destroying lives. We have to be nice because he has a family owe the family. And a little thanks for no name coder who said the people should have hit that thumbs up button. So thank you. You cool? No name coder. We appreciate it. And now
Ben Shapiro:
To
Taya Graham:
Talk about the online reaction to and some of the, let’s just say hot takes on the state of American healthcare. I’m joined by Kat Abu and Prem Thakker.
Speaker 8:
Welcome
Taya Graham:
Kat Abu and welcome. Kat Abu is a freelance video creator as well as a contributor for Mother Jones and sat her explainers on right-wing journalism have accrued tens of millions of views. Wow, that’s cool. And Prem Thakker is SAT’s political correspondent also writing a weekly column called Sub, excuse me, subtext with prem. And please make sure to follow their work. We should have their social media tags on this screen and hopefully in the live chat for you as well. So I just want to thank you both so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Taya Graham:
Thanks for having us
Stephen Janis:
Be here. Thank you.
Taya Graham:
So I’d like to put my first question to Kat. You have seen the outrage from the public when scolded by various politicians and media figures for not having enough empathy for Brian Thompson and his family. How do you view or explain what you’ve seen online?
Kat Abughazaleh:
I mean, I’ve seen what everyone else has been seeing. Not a lot of empathy. And honestly, I mean, can you blame them? Can you blame this country where our healthcare system is so messed up? Where when I was a bartender, my coworkers and I used to take fish antibiotics because we didn’t want to pay to go to the doctor if we were sick. And you just got to hope that it’s an infection. If you’re living in a country like that where you’re paying $74,000 instead of $148,000 to get a heart stint, it’s really hard to feel empathy for the person that is making $10 million minimum per year off of your misery. And honestly, except for people with power and influence, and of course boot liquors, I haven’t seen many people rush to defend this guy. I can feel bad for his family. I can acknowledge that vigilante violence is not a good solution.
I mean, that’s a fun thing about the right is there’s people on Fox News, for example. People that have power on the right are super upset about this. But they’ve spent the last four or five, 10 years cheering on vigilante violence. Kyle Rittenhouse attacks against trans and gay people. So many Tucker used to go when he was on Fox monologue for 20 minutes about how he need more vigilante violence. And then you have to act surprised when this guy gets iced. I mean, you can recognize that there’s a very slippery slope here. And also not be surprised.
Stephen Janis:
Just to get your take too on this sort of outpouring, what’s your take on it? And as a journalist who reports on a lot of this stuff, what do you think about it?
Prem Thakker:
I think,
Stephen Janis:
Oh, prem. Sorry. No prem. Sorry. Prem.
Prem Thakker:
Well, just going off what Kat said, I think let’s start by just setting a premise. You and I, we have with this collective odd life, this also shared burden of existence, it is kind of this sacred experience. They all kind of share. And so taking that away from someone is vulgar. In many ways. It’s personified, vulgar what more can be said. So let’s work backwards from that premise to then figure out, as Kat’s gesturing towards why so many people can either make jokes about a killing to be indifferent or to even cheer at the thought of it, at the symbolism of it. And one thing that we wrote on at the EO is that there’s a lot of contradictions that need to be addressed in something like this. I mean, you guys talked about this in the intro of the show. Some of the same politicians who insist that such a killing of an innocent man, a father, a husband, is indefensible, have spent the past 15, 14 months not only defending, but funding the mass killing of tens of thousands of parents, husbands, and wives and kids, to use their words of how we describe people.
Days after Thompson was killed, two migrant teens were stabbed after being asked if they spoke English, no mass police or media mobilization. And of course, as we saw as Mangione was apprehended, Daniel Penney was acquitted after choking. Jordan Neely, a homeless black man brought to desperation to death on the subway. And the point is not to equalize these case, but to realize that putting them together sort of brings us to look at these contradictions of who we see are human asks, or for us to ask who gets our empathy and to figure out what kind of society we tolerate. How many migrants has this government killed either by causing havoc all over the world and creating these migrants in the first place, or when they try to come here and meeting the militarized border that we have, how much tax dollars have gone to those campaigns and wars? How many people do we live without a bed and then meet them with violence? And doesn’t this violence just beget more violence? So these questions are worth asking and interrogating.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, and I mean, I think as you point out, if there’s one system that lacks empathy, one government institution, it has to be our healthcare system seems completely devoid of empathy. And so that’s a really good point. Tay, you had want to,
Taya Graham:
Actually, I wanted to ask Kat a question. Do you think this public frustration with the healthcare costs could actually catalyze broader support for Medicare for all or some other form of universal healthcare? Do you think this could become a movement?
Kat Abughazaleh:
I mean, it already is and isn’t. People by and large want Medicare for all? Especially if you take away the politicization of it. It’s why so many people support the Affordable Care Act, but they hate Obamacare. If you’re just saying everyone gets healthcare, everyone supports that. And it’s been like that since forever. I mean, some people buy into the propaganda, but once again, when you strip it all down, that’s what every average American, every average person wants. And our politicians know that. Our lawmakers know that. Our health insurance companies know that. Every single organization of power in this country knows that. And they have purposely stopped us from doing that. They have purposely kept us from getting the care we need. And that’s not an accident. This country loves to pay more to make their own people miserable. I was listening to a Behind the Bastards episode the other day while I was cleaning my house. I was re-listening to some of the old ones, and there was one about the creation of the FDA, which started because we were cutting milk with horse piss and there was just poop and everything, and every food was disgusting. It was like barely even food. Highly recommend
Not the food, the podcast, and any of the sources in there. And so that’s Make
Prem Thakker:
America healthy again,
Kat Abughazaleh:
Make America healthy again. That’s why the FDA was created because people realized this was a problem. But before it was created, all of these giant food manufacturing, meat packing industries got together and tried to launch a campaign saying they are trying to stop your freedom. They are trying to stop you from drinking milk with sawdust and wriggling worms in it. This was an actual campaign by them, and it worked for some people, but it’s the same idea at that point. It’s just cheaper to pasteurize your milk, just boil the milk. Oh my God. But they refused because they would rather continue to hurt others.
Speaker 8:
And
Kat Abughazaleh:
It’s the same thing now. It’s cheaper to have healthcare for all, but we continue to pay so much money just to put those dollars in 50 guys’ pockets.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a great
Kat Abughazaleh:
Point.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a really great point. Per prem, a lot of people, a lot of corporations now are beefing up security. I heard they spent $250,000 to protect the CE of UnitedHealthcare. But do you think this outpouring will actually, they’ll ever say, well, maybe we need to change our behavior a little bit, or maybe we need to alter the way we do business. Do you think this kind of pushback can actually have an effect on corporate behavior? I know it’s a strange question, but I’m just curious if you think any of it’s working or getting through to them.
Prem Thakker:
I think when I think about this question, I think about 2020 where we had this coalescing moment of millions of people across the country, regardless of their politics and backgrounds, all for a moment being forced to think about a lot of questions at once. One is with regards to race, their relation to race, their relation to the people around them, their neighbors no less. During a time where this awful, unpredictable, uncertain pandemic is sweeping the nation, bringing people to, in some respects have much more relatable experiences than they had had previously altogether. And all this combined in the lead up to the election, I think brought a lot of people in this country, again, regardless of their politics, to ask these bigger questions about what kind of society they want to be a part of and to contribute to and how do they want to be alongside their neighbors. But then of course, in the ensuing months, we saw a lot of that energy, a lot of that frustration, questioning intellectual humility that is very beautiful, get quelled or subside or just brought into very antithetical to solidarity type of spirits and movements. Yeah, true. We saw a lot of radicalization that we’re seeing the consequences of now in this election over the ensuing months because there was no vessel for that. There was no
Welcoming of that. The people who tried to channel that in something where we’re set aside, we’re pushed aside. And of course, it’s hard to bring a lot of people who are all dealing with all sorts of questions and their own relation to those questions into one sort of coherent movement. But to at least welcome those questions and to give space and time to people, to ask them regardless of who they are is important. And so moving forward in the next weeks and months, I think we will get a cousin of that and seeing will this energy and these questionings and these very sincere and earnest grapplings by all sorts of people, will they be welcomed by not just the people in power who maybe want to push that aside, but also all of us, we all play a role in that.
Stephen Janis:
That’s a good point. And I mean, I think one difference in this, well, you talked about maybe the George Floyd movement, which really did change policing. We saw it on the grassroots level here. We saw in our legislatures when they actually passed reform. And I hope that the fact that people are trying to focused on healthcare with a focus on something specific, it can translate into a movement that focuses on something specific right here. We have to change healthcare. We’re not just trying to change everything all at once, but even though that is kind of everything everywhere all at once, however, hopefully that kind of focus can maybe bring some fruition in terms of actual change.
Taya Graham:
I hope so as well. And I have to say what Kat’s comment on why we needed the FDA just keeps ringing my ears. Oh God. Because I remember learning about how, let’s say problematic, our food distribution system could be beforehand.
Kat Abughazaleh:
Don’t worry. Read the book, the Poison Squad, by the way, just going to plug that book. Really good.
Taya Graham:
No, that’s great. I appreciate it. I really want to follow up. Sorry,
Stephen Janis:
Cable fixes. Don’t worry.
Taya Graham:
But what I wanted to do is I have a clip that I think kind of speaks to some of the things you were talking about earlier, Kat, and it’s a clip, and I think some of the people we’re watching right now, they might find it a little puzzling.
Speaker 8:
And
Taya Graham:
It’s a video from Ben Shapiro where he responds to the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Now, I’m sure most of you are familiar with fax over Feelings. Ben Shapiro, he is a conservative firebrand, best known for his work as host of a Daily Wire. And his YouTube videos receive millions of views where he’s primarily known for destroying those who dare to discuss policy with him. But what’s interesting about the video, or at least what I think is interesting about the video I’m about to play, is that Shapiro tries and fails to characterize the reaction to violence as a left versus right story. And namely, that was the left that was insensitive and even blood thirsty. So let’s just take a listen.
Ben Shapiro:
According to the New York Times, none of this stopped social media commentators from leaping to conclusions and showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who is a husband and father of two children, thoughts and deductibles to the family. Read one comment underneath the video of the shooting posted online by CNN. Unfortunately, my condolences are out of network. A TikTok user wrote, I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for it by insurance. It makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all those patients and their families. And these sorts of messages were incredibly common across the internet. Be discussed yesterday, a Columbia professor who wrote something very similar, unfortunately bubbling under the surface of all this, is something very serious, really serious. What is that serious thing? The revolutionary left is creeping into the mainstream. Yesterday we talked about liberals versus the left. Liberals are people who disagree with me on public policy but aren’t in favor of the murder of their opponents. The left is a different thing. The shooting of Thompson has unleashed a wave of evil from members of the left. Thompson was not a criminal.
Taya Graham:
So as you see, he blames Democrats and in particular, the left for the
Stephen Janis:
Revolutionary left, which is creeping into the mainstream
Taya Graham:
Really for the apathetic and negative online response. So Kat, I was wondering what your take was on Ben Shapiro’s rendering of the public response.
Kat Abughazaleh:
Oh, I am so glad you asked. Thank you so much. I had to bounce after this question. But if you look at the comment section of this video, it’s pretty much just people who are identifying as right leaning or even fully right wing, realizing the entire point that there’s no war but the class war, they realize, wait, you just want us to hate us hate each other, because guess what? I grew up conservative. I’m from Texas. I know plenty of people are. We all get fucked in the ass by health insurance premiums. It’s death taxes and being screwed over by the American healthcare system left or right. It doesn’t matter. It’s just rich or poor. And I don’t just mean like a hundred K, 200 KA year, rich, I mean obscenely rich. You can get bankrupted so fast in this country if you just get cancer like curable cancer. That’s unbelievable. And so his characterization, I have seen some people express sympathy over Brian Thompson and I recognize that, and I think that’s totally valid. That’s how you’re feeling. But they also recognize why other people are angry or see him as a symbol rather than a person, because for him, we’re all just faceless bags of cash when he was alive. And so it makes sense that people would see him the same way, but rather a faceless corpse for the healthcare industry.
And Ben Shapiro just completely misses the point. He’s so focused on protecting the rich and powerful because he’s part of them that he forgot to do his fake populism thing. His, oh, I’m not from California, and desperately wanted be in Hollywood, but no one would take me shtick. It’s pathetic. And I was just thinking, this is how a lot of people get to class consciousness. I’m down, but some people won’t be convinced on Fox. They switched to Daniel Penny real fast to talk about how great he was. And the cognitive dissonance probably didn’t click for a lot of viewers, but will that racism still override their hatred towards the healthcare industry next time they’re signing a hospital bill? That’s what I keep thinking right now. People are mad, but of course it’ll die down. It’ll ebb and flow, especially as trial comes all this stuff. But what about every time someone has to sign for their chemotherapy or hell, when I get my narcolepsy medication every month and I never know how much it’s going to cost left or right, it doesn’t matter. All of us are going to be dealing with this.
Stephen Janis:
Well,
Kat Abughazaleh:
Wow,
Taya Graham:
KA, that was amazing. And
Stephen Janis:
That was the first time I saw our editor-in-Chief Smile during the, that was his first smile with your
Taya Graham:
Use. Used
Stephen Janis:
Some colorful language. I
Taya Graham:
Think there was some smiles that I wish you could have seen behind
Stephen Janis:
The first time. Most time he’s been kind of glaring at us. I just wish you could have seen. Thank you for that. Thank you for
Taya Graham:
That. Yes. Well, thanks for having me, guys. Sorry we have to let you go, but next time, we’re going to have to keep you for a little bit longer. Okay? Yes, absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Taya Graham:
Bye. Y all. Okay. We appreciate you.
Stephen Janis:
Now, crem, I know you’re a fan of Ben Shapiro. I’m sure I can just tell by your thoughtful commentary that Ben wrote, but do you think this is an issue that can transcend ideology? Is this an issue where people can actually come together and say, let’s push back rather than just fight amongst these other?
Prem Thakker:
Yeah. Yeah. I think there has been for years and years and years, just a broader appetite by people of all political stripes for something different, something that feels different in your experience of living in this country. And a lot of that obviously relates to the political nature of this country. And I think Kat put it so beautifully that there’s certain things for which that experience of how a medical insurance company treats you is radicalizing in so many ways for people, as we’ve seen over
The past week in terms of how people are expressing their interactions with companies like this. And for many people who have gone through political changes, I know I’ve gone through many worldview shifts, a benefit of just wonderful people around me, teaching me things, strongly things, opening my eyes to things. All it takes sometimes is one thing, and especially if it’s a personal thing. And that can just be a gateway to seeing that you deserve more, that to being a society and to contribute to it and to be part of it and to be just screwed over and over again is just a dissonance, a discrepancy that can become so overwhelming to lead someone to even do something as drastic as we’ve seen this week.
Stephen Janis:
It’s really interesting, given some beautiful metaphysical descriptions of this problem, is this in some sense a spiritual crisis for people not being able to reconcile the irrational nature of a system with their own views of their own country. And somehow this is creating a certain anger and separation from the system itself. I mean, it’s, you brought up so many interesting ways of looking at this that I didn’t even think about.
Prem Thakker:
Yeah, I guess I’m just so, and I apologize if any of it seems just too
Stephen Janis:
Cloud. No, I thought it was really cool. That’s why I
Prem Thakker:
Just wanted to get some, I guess I’m just so in this moment, keyed into this sense of contradiction, putting these cases all together, juxtaposing them together to really think what we’re building, what we’ve inherited also as well, of course, we are individuals that are inheriting something, but by permission or not, we have inherited it by choice or not. We haven’t inherited it. And I think as much as there is exhaustion, especially over recent years for so many understandable reasons, regardless of your politics, there’s also just this keen thirst for this exhaustion to either end or to lead towards something. And so
Stephen Janis:
I agree.
Prem Thakker:
I guess one thing I think of is with regards to Thompson, who, again, to me, Thompson shouldn’t have been killed. And in this question, what is also at stake that we should ask is how can we be in a society for which Thompson or a symbol now of the echelon that he represents can rise, can climb the ladder to oversee a company that denies healthcare coverage through artificial intelligence, through algorithm that leads to all this mass suffering that thousands of people have been expressing over the past week to us. How can someone over time come to oversee that and look it in the eye and not want to rip up that crushing status quo?
So we should ask whether he Thompson should have been brought up in a world where he could have risen to such a position for such a position to exist for such consequences to it be real. In the same way that we worry about the dehumanization of migrants, of people in Palestine, of the homeless. There is this sense of the way we set up society now to also dehumanize us in the roles that we play in either allowing this to continue or for someone to rise up to have that job that separates someone from their own humanity. You’d imagine, for instance, you or I or any person listening that you could say, oh, if I was in that position or if I had all this money, I’d want to help people. And that might be true, but somehow some way for a lot of people that get to that level of power, they don’t do what we think we would’ve done. And so there’s a sort of different kind of dehumanization that’s at stake here as well that I think is worth interrogating.
Stephen Janis:
That is profound.
Taya Graham:
Yeah, it is actually an excellent point, and I’m glad you added that layer of depth to the conversation. We really appreciate it. And so I actually kind of feel bad because I’m going back to Ben Shapiro now after a beautiful moment like that, but I thought it might speak to some of the conversation we were having earlier. And I just want to share just a few of the comments from his subscribers and from his longtime viewers. And please don’t think I was being petty by doing this, but I went and looked for the dislikes ratio on the video. Now, I took this screenshot, I think probably two nights ago, and there’s a good chance that it has increased since then. I think it’s probably increased quite a bit. So let me share some of the comments that were in the YouTube section. I just pulled out just a few
Stephen Janis:
To his video,
Taya Graham:
Specific video.
I’m not buying this left versus right S anymore. Ben, I want healthcare for my family. According to Ben, I went from Trump voter to revolutionary leftist in the span of a month. Remember guys, Ben has more in common with that CEO than he has with any of us. One death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic, except Ben took this at face value. Ben’s net worth is around $50 million. He’s a peer of Brian Thompson, not of us, the average American citizen. He makes money by generating hate and division. Oh, and last one, not going to lie, these comments are making me feel patriotic. That has 7,200 upvotes.
So as you can see from the comments, this issue is hardly partisan. Many of his viewers expressed their own pain and difficulties with healthcare. As a matter of fact, there’s one comment I want to put up there, but it was very long. But suffice it to say there was a young man who would be considered a Democrat, and his uncle is a Republican, and he said they both watched his father die. And he said, when his father, me, his uncle was on Facebook, he basically put F that CEO. And that’s a divided household there. And they both agreed that the healthcare system is, let’s say, leaving people short. So just to emphasize this point, these are not unsympathetic radicals that Shapiro had described as barbaric and homicidal leftists. So I’m sure it was probably to his surprise that this was not a left right issue and instead seems to be a class issue. And it seems to span the political spectrum. And I’ll just say this, after a very contentious election, it was actually a relief to see something that all of us could agree on.
Stephen Janis:
I think that what most of us, someone say said the prem, and we’ll get back to prem in one second. It’s just interesting that for people, this isn’t political, but it’s very personal, I think is what he’s saying in the sense that you are seeing something that’s supposed to work absolutely fail, and you feel helpless that you can’t do it. It just seems like it’s set up to make us helpless. And I think that’s kind of the spiritual crisis that we’re talking about for people because how do we fix it? I mean, Jeff Singer who’s seen it from the ground up was not, let’s say, optimistic about fixing this. So
Taya Graham:
Yeah, and just to be fair and balanced and to show how deeply entrenched the problem is of let’s say our media elites not understanding how the healthcare system can be so devastating. Let me share with you the story that comes from Democrat and former C Nnn anchor, Chris Cuomo, brother of New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Let’s take a short listen to his analysis.
Speaker 13:
Now, what is the reaction to this? To me, it’s the biggest surprise I get. Not liking insurance companies. My family is sideways with one right now, but these tweets, these tweets that came out about this, I’ll get to ’em in a second. Don’t put ’em up yet. Don’t put ’em up yet. What does history tell us about when things like this happen? CEOs are killed very rarely. Okay. When it does happen, it is usually for political purposes, like when in this country. I can’t give you any examples until this one. Great. But here’s one things for sure. There are a lot of people who are happy about this. Yes, hiding in the nice anonymous dumpster fire that is Twitter, but show these tweets celebrating his death. Even people who called themselves journalists, Ken Klippenstein and Taylor Lorenz tweeting about how bad a man he was the day he died. Don’t these people understand? Won’t someone in their life if these are their real names, explained to them, you are worse than what you oppose when you celebrate murder as a justifiable end for disagreement over policy. I mean, what the hell is going wrong here?
Taya Graham:
Wow. Worse than what they oppose. And amazingly, both Ben Shapiro and Cuomo cited Taylor Rez and Ken Klippenstein. So I thought it was really interesting how a right wing, conservative and a Democrat could somehow come to the same conclusion that these reporters tweets are the problem, not the system or the profiteering and prem. I would love for you to respond to seeing this Democrat media elite from a family of Democrat political elites respond to the public. I mean, I think some might see this as multimillionaires perhaps banding together. How would you interpret both the Democrat and Republican elite outrage with the public response?
Prem Thakker:
So when I see reactions like this, or ones we’ve seen in the so-called papers of record, the magazines of record, for some reason, my mind goes back to the late and great Michael Brooks, who of course told us to be kind with people and ruthless with systems. And I think of how many of these institutions of power really focus on the former, but only kindness towards certain people amongst themselves, and certainly do nothing with the latter of being ruthless with systems. It is, of course, again, so important that Thompson should have been killed. It’s awful that he was killed. And still at the same time, the stakes here is not about, or rather, the stakes is about a much larger thing that these people in these establishment circles really do not want to engage with, which is this broader frustration that sure people might be projecting onto one individual, but it’s not about Brian. And as a human, of course, we care of as humanity. The issue at stakes is something that these people are apparently not interested in engaging with of the system that so many people feel so shut down from. I think of another headline that I saw today, I think it was in The Atlantic that talked about how this moment was a moment of civilization
In a similar respect to what Cuomo was saying of when you look at history and you think about moments like this, we are living through current history of mass de civilization, of mass dehumanization, no less than over the past 14 months of tens of thousands of people on US taxpayer dollar, a dime being killed, being ethnically cleansed, displaced. There was just a headline from the other day that I believe it was upwards of 90% of children in Gaza find that their death to be imminent, that scores of them would want to even maybe end their life. That these people and their livelihoods, their lives as they know it, are fundamentally changed, if not
Speaker 8:
Over.
Prem Thakker:
And so this concern that we see among some circles of the media now with regards to de civilization dehumanization, strike me as I mean insensitive, to put it lightly, but really out of touch in a functional sense. And I think sure, you can be concerned about someone being killed, and I think we all can get behind that.
Speaker 8:
There’s
Prem Thakker:
Just also, not even just, there’s many more people who deserve that same proportional level of concern. If we are going to have a nationwide media frenzy, police frenzy over one individual being killed, and then at the same token, the same tax dollars that pay those police also bomb 45,000 generously, probably more. That is a stakes contradiction of our humanity. And so I would invite Ben Shapiro or Mr. Cuomo or people of the Atlantic to engage with those questions. I am very glad that they’re so concerned with the humanity and life of one husband, of one father. I would love to see that same energy in those same words towards tens of thousands of people over the past 14 months withstanding the millions of people in this country that in a variety of ways, whether it’s because of the way that we’re destroying their environments, whether the way that we allow them in the richest country on earth to be one mistake away from poverty, from homelessness, from doing all that with injuries that are just devastating for the rest of their lives. I would love to see if they could spare that same humanity towards those people too.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. It seems like rather than dec civilization, we’re going towards mass insanity. When you talk about the contradictions that we see in the response to things like Gaza versus the response to the killing of the CEO, and I wondered how much that has to do with, in your mind, the algorithmic insanity that has been constructed by these billionaires in which we’re supposed to have these conversations and where we’re supposed to have empathy and connect. I mean, how much are we just subject? I mean, because very interesting how the algorithms all point us toward the humanity of A CEO and away from the humanity of people in Gaza. And I wonder how much that corporate, billionaire, algorithmic world that we inhabit is responsible for this lack of empathy and then the defensiveness of the people who constructed it. Basically what it is, Cuomo is being defensive because he has benefited from the system he has constructed around us under the auspices of journalism, which to me is ridiculous. All he is advocating for the elites, in my opinion. So how much do you think they’re just responding to protect themselves in some ways?
Prem Thakker:
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a lot to that and it’s very frustrating. You speak to these algorithmic forces that kind of push us one way or another. One thing that I found frustrating is especially over this whole Twitter, blue sky situation of describing blue sky as more of an echo chamber than Twitter, when in reality every space to a certain extent is an echo chamber. And I mean, of course that’s not meant to be a reductive meta statement. I mean,
Whether it’s Twitter, whether it’s blue sky, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s a physical space, whether it’s the bar across the street that you and your friends go to every week, there is a certain level of normalized conversation that you experience. And what’s been frustrating for me is that of course, things have gotten much worse in the online landscape over the past few years. And with conversations like this, when you’re talking about contradiction, when you’re talking about things that people can either empathize with or intimately understand themselves, it’s not always that hard to really connect with someone. As much of a cliche as it sounds when you just sit down with them and then chat about where you’re seeing something and where they’re seeing something, it really isn’t that impossible when you come into something with a lot of humility and openness and generosity, but also candidness and also conviction. And of course, places like Twitter, places like Blue Sky, or not necessarily Blue Sky, but places like Twitter, places like Facebook, especially in this moment, incentivize the exact opposite places like YouTube. And so to your point about these people who have become the fore, the standard bearers, the protectors, the defenders of these spaces, their reaction right now is so telling, because it’s this, in some ways it feels almost desperate, this
Stephen Janis:
Last
Prem Thakker:
Ditch effort to defend these spaces, these positions that they’ve been able to accrue over time, these almost captive audiences that in some ways they’re preventing them from connecting with you or or anyone else on our common humanity.
Stephen Janis:
Can we just take a Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Prem Thakker:
I’m sorry. I was just going to say, I guess as a final note, it’s just like on this question that in some ways it’s up to independent new media that we occupy to really try to meet that challenge.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. And Taya, just before you ask your next question, I just want to say, I want to say thank you to all the million dollar consultants in the Democratic party who decided that healthcare was not an issue worth raising during this campaign. I just want you to enjoy your yachts and your boats and your condos and all the things you bought because you told the Democrats not to talk about healthcare. I hope you enjoy your money. I hope it was worth it. Sorry, tey, I just had to say that.
Taya Graham:
No, that’s okay. I mean, I thought it was an
Stephen Janis:
Interesting premise, inspiring
Taya Graham:
Prime, talking about engaging with humility and you chose to engage with sarcasm, but I think they’re both
Stephen Janis:
Effective tools useful, both useful.
Taya Graham:
They’re both valuable tools. Oh,
Stephen Janis:
Call me out live. That was not sarcastic. I was sincere.
Taya Graham:
Oh, okay. Pardon me.
It’s actually interesting you brought up campaign and politics because this economic discontent, it’s showing self in other areas. This is just, as we were talking about earlier, a very, very personal place where it’s showing, I think almost everyone has some sort of interaction with the healthcare system or a loved one of theirs, ASN interaction with the healthcare system that went could have gone better. So I think it’s very, very personal. But the thing is, in the most recent election, you can’t argue Republicans swept the board and they have in the past voted against any form of universal healthcare. But as I was mentioning earlier, my research showed that Democrats also receive a great deal of campaign support from these health insurance companies and Super Prep pacs. So I was just curious, prem, if you thought that this discontent and particularly the energy that and emotion around healthcare, do you think there’s a chance that it could help shape the political landscape? The next elections that are coming up? Do you think that you’re seeing a movement build here?
Prem Thakker:
Yes. So as we saw after November the election, there was a lot of, whether it’s anguish, shock, no surprise at all, we told you so all sorts of reactions. But one particular thing is that there’s this broader exhaustion amongst a lot of the liberal base, whether it’s organizations get out the vote efforts, pundits figures, members of Congress. And there’s also seemingly this, even before the events of the past week or two, this soil rife for some sort of something for some sort of planting of something different for hunger and anger at how the election played out, particularly amongst the left. And I find that a lot of people on the hill, members of Congress, people who work within and inside of outside of Congress are really trying to figure out, again, even before this week, how to really affirmatively present a new case, a stronger case, a different case, a case that rejects maybe some of the features of the campaign we just saw by the Kamala Harris campaign that really distinguishes itself a movement more than just a one year campaign.
And one thing I think about with regards to the moment now in terms of whether there will be really a stronger push to change, not just the way Democrats go about things, but also how they treat this issue of healthcare, is this question of persuasion that keeps coming up amongst a lot of the pundits of how do you meet these Trump voters? How do you change their minds? Clearly it seems like a lot of people of all political persuasions believe things need to change. There’s these sort of veering on condescending questions of, oh, these people keep voting against their interests. And I think one aspect that parts left I think are really trying to hone in on is that persuasion is not just about trying to code switch in different dialects and try to appear like everything and nothing all at once. We’ve seen that in fact, that fell on its face this past year,
And I think Kat was getting to as well, is that part of persuasion is seeing people as individuals that are not just definitively a MAGA Republican or a liberal or what have you, these labels and not sort of no labels fashion, but I mean quite sincerely that these labels really prevent us from understanding that people are dynamic. They’re not static, they’re not chess pieces, they’re people in the same way that you and I have changed our opinions or viewers on something. So of these people, which is to say voters. And so I think there’s this burgeoning appetite on the left to view voters as such and to thus treat them accordingly, which is to have an affirmative message to not water it down based on who you’re talking to, but to actually argue the case and to say, look, you might see yourself as this political identity or a Trump voter or what have you, part of the MAGA movement or a never Trump Republican, and that you don’t necessarily want to go so far. But these are ideas we’re talking about. We’re not talking about political identities. Go,
Stephen Janis:
I’m sorry, go ahead. I was just saying it was just so frustrating to watch the campaign where they said, well, Kamala Harris has perfectly positioned herself in the middle because she went against her idea to have Medicare for all. And then I watch a response of people like Josh Shapiro who is literally lecturing people for having an emotional outburst about a horribly unjust system. And I don’t know, do you think the Democrats get it at this point, how off they were and how wrong they were? They see that it is a communication and narrative problem when you can’t make the connection between people’s anger at healthcare and there’s a better system we can sell you. If we could just tell the story. I mean, they seem to be horrible storytellers and they seem to be amazingly insulated. I find it very frustrating. Do you think that Democrats are really getting it at this point?
Prem Thakker:
I think the question is less about the individual actors and more about a struggle between those actors, which is to say the question is not whether the Harris campaign staff or the DNC will all of a sudden wake up. It’s rather a matter of who’s going to take the switches, who’s going to take the steering wheel. I think that over the next coming weeks and months in terms of not just committee assignments, who’s going to be the ranking member of what committee, but moreover, who is going to really try to take charge, whether by official levers or by messaging and by just getting more of the will of the people point to get them to trust them. I think that is the bigger power struggle that I think is only starting to brew. I think there’s a lot of people who are really trying to figure out, again, both members of Congress and also people who work with and around them, how they can sort of jockey and figure out which message can sort of carry the day, which one will be the Democratic party. So I think it’s reasonable to ask to your point of seeing how insular some of these people were, if they’re all of a sudden going to listen or learn. And I think, again, I see individuals as individuals as much as I can, but I think the question is much more interesting and pressing as far as who will win the broader power struggle as far as will the critique, the criticizers, the people who are critical, the people who are sort of fielding these criticisms and thoughts, will they be the ones to actually get to make
More of the decisions? I think that’s something we’ll have to watch for.
Stephen Janis:
That’s interesting. Leads us back probably to Bernie Sanders, but go ahead, te, sorry.
Taya Graham:
But a prem, we were all talking about Democrats and Republicans and the Democrat run city of New York as well. And in your article in eo, which is titled 2 26 year Olds, one killed a Homeless Man, another is suspected of killing Healthcare, CEO. You mentioned that two young non-English speaking migrants were staffed and one was killed. How would you characterize the responses to the death of A CEO versus the death of a teenager, although now currently police are alleging that this was related to Venezuelan migrant gang activity. What has your reporting revealed about the bias in the media?
Prem Thakker:
Right. Yeah, I think the question itself is kind of brings about the self-evident contrast, which is that some of your listeners might not have even heard about the latter case. And of course, this is not unsurprising to us. We live in a society for which, not to say we live in a society, but we live in a society for which this is almost to be expected that of course, someone who is a CEO of big company, the face of success, someone who perhaps has rubbed shoulders with the same people who govern, legislate or oversee editorial agendas of newsrooms would then get more attention than two migrants. And I think this also gets to this other sort of question of, or even just dynamic of accepted, normalized dehumanization. This reminds me again of a sort of unsurprising dynamic of which, and something that’s been concerning for me, especially over the past few weeks, is this almost getting approaching towards normalization of the suffering. And Palestine even in some respects, Lebanon and so on the Middle East, broadly amorphously in so far as how people think about that region. Much of this country especially, particularly those in power, I should say, not necessarily everyday people see that side of the world as again, definitionally in almost a static way, a hotbed of violence, a place where those people over there were always find something to fight about, to kill each other about.
It reminds me of politicians who sort of superficially say, oh, Israel Palestine has been going on for thousands of years, which what are you talking about? And so in this same respect, not only is this sort of dichotomy of, oh, how much priority is there for a rich person versus migrants in this country, especially given how both parties tell us we should treat migrants. It doesn’t shake the boat at all that two migrants would be stabbed, if anything, it’s like, oh yeah, right, of course. And so it’s sinister, it’s horrifying. It again, I think gets to this broader question of accepted dehumanization, accepted civilization that we’ve allowed to be normal for far too long in this country. And it’s unfortunately, yeah, self-evident when you look at the cases just juxtaposed together. Of course, again, there’s different contexts for every killing, every murder that exists, but broadly speaking, in terms of just the generic human concern and what is manufactured concern is obviously drastically different.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, it’s interesting that we would elect someone in this particular cycle speaking about what you’re speaking about, who is inherently cruel. I mean, Trump is, if anything, just a cruel man. And it seems like we’ve sort of submerged ourselves in a sense of cruelty that sort of transcends almost every ideological boundary that we just want to be cruel. And I wanted to ask you a question because this show is the Inequality Watch, and we deal a lot with questions of inequality, economic inequality, and we’d had either Professor Reich on the last show or it was, I don’t know if it was Dr. Wolf, but they talked about the Gilded Age period and how much wealth inequality is very similar in terms of the extent and the extreme. And I was wondering what your thoughts are about wealth inequality and driving some of these issues and some of the conversations that people might be reacting to a healthcare system, but they’re also unnerved by the incredible inequality, especially when they’re lectured by millionaires and billionaires who seem to control the conversation. I mean, how much is inequality driving the conversation and the anger that people are feeling about our healthcare system?
Prem Thakker:
Definitely, definitely. And I would just note that of course, this is a huge conversation that Val has raised, class, gender and so on. Understood. I’m certainly not going to flatten race, gender, or No, no, I wasn’t asking. Of course, of course. I just as a preface to say that regardless, I mean putting that, factoring that in there is this broader sort of, and I think this relates to something I was getting at in the beginning, which is that there is this general experience that regardless of who we are, we share in how we live our lives, which is just this uncertainty of what life even means of the beauty of it and the pain of it. And again, taking into account that of course our relations to that obviously very fastly on our backgrounds, on our race and so on, but there’s this flailing that many people relate to mentally, spiritually, physically, when you live in such a society for which the contradictions of the haves and half nots are often on such brazen display.
And again, this is not to somehow say that this country is just a bed full of sleeping class conscious people waiting to be woken up. It’s not necessarily to glamorize that or to simplify it. It’s just to say that there is a sense, especially particularly in this country, more than just any western capitalist nation on earth, particularly this country, that we ought to be living in a different way. That the daily flailing, frustration, anguish, or even just confusion or uncertainty that we have doesn’t have to be as such. And some people feel that in an optimistic way. Some people feel that in a very pessimistic way, in a way that this sucks my life sucks that I feel insecure in a certain way, I feel whether it’s financially or otherwise or socially I feel lonely, I feel depressed. This country has a flavor and variety of sicknesses that I think all relate to this broader flailing, this broader separation from one another. That is, to your question, fomented fostered, encouraged by those at the top because it supports them, it allows them to continue to be there, it benefits them, and it prevents people from asking, what if we could have something different?
And so it’s this ever present question of given that broader, relatable experience in one way or another for most people, how can there be a tap in into that given? Of course, people have their own individual lives and life stories that brings them to want to see each other as each other and to figure out where we go from here. And of course there’s no easy answer to that, but I think engaging in those questions are more interesting and compelling and necessary than these superficial hollow incurious and insincere narratives we’re seeing from some of these bigger box outlets.
Taya Graham:
This is going to be, first off, I want to thank you for staying with us and adding the level of depth that you’ve had to this conversation. Absolutely.
Speaker 8:
It’s been,
Taya Graham:
I have a final question for you, and I feel like we’ve got the right person for this question. Honestly, I wanted to know what you thought storytelling and journalism would play in shifting public opinion and creating accountability for the healthcare industry because already social media has had an impact allowing people to share their feelings and their uncensored thoughts. But surely media, both independent and mainstream, has an obligation here as well. But places like ProPublica and the nation and democracy now, even the Real News, we’ve been reporting on healthcare for years, so what do we need to do different? What more can we do? What is the obligation of a journalist right here?
Prem Thakker:
So I think back to what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about Cuomo, the Atlantic, the New York Times and so on, where by benefit of being in the power center of being in the establishment, they get to have the monopoly on objectivity, the monopoly on
Norms, the monopoly on what is and is not radical. And I think it’s important to underscore, and it cannot be said enough that there is no journalist in the business that has no bias, that has no lens for which they’re looking through things too, because that is definitionally inhuman, that is definitionally not how we work. We come to whatever we do with our experiences, and you can say you remove yourself from them, but then you’re serving something else. You’re serving someone else. In the same way that our media ecosystem can be described as political or radical or this or that or what have you or not objective, the people who are saying that are often making a judgment case, they’re making a value judgment, they’re making their own subjective view on what is and is not objective. But I can tell you what, I might not be a lawyer.
I might not be a scientist, but I might not even be a weatherman. But I can tell you if it’s raining outside and I look outside, it’s raining, I will tell you it’s raining. And I think about this with regards to the US government’s response to what’s happening in Palestine where human rights groups, where the United Nations, where people themselves who are suffering this tell us this is a genocidal war. Again, I might not be an international lawyer, but I can look at that. I can look at the facts of the matter and say it’s a genocide. So there’s this, firstly to answer your question, this basic understanding and really ownership that, yeah, we are coming into this business, the royal we with certain premises of what is and is not true, is or is not sort of a world that we see as radical or not radical.
Is it radical for millions or thousands, if not millions of people across this country to feel frustration at the industry? Or is it radical for that industry to do what it does to those people? These sort of basic parameters are I think, ones that our ecosystem should not be sort of shy to claim as premises we’re operating from. And to not only say that, to be transparent, because I think one thing that people always appreciate no matter where they come from is for you to be straight up with them, is to say, look, in the same way that we’re being honest with you about where we are coming from, you should take a look at these other entities to see how transparent they’re being with you about where they’re coming from. And B, if they’re pretending that they’re actually being just this sort of amorphous, unreal objective source, I think being honest, being real with people is really important.
I think that is the first sort of task that we have to really embrace rather than sort of tiptoe around. We have these premises about this world and our role in it. I think that’s the first big step. I think the second thing that I’ll add is just going back to something I said earlier, which is again, to really see the people that we cover as ourselves, which is to say regardless of whether we relate to them or sympathize with them as much as we can to empathize, sympathize with them, is that they are as dynamic as we are. They are as beautiful and interesting and worthy of consideration and generosity and humility as we wish others would treat us. And I think that is especially important both in how we cover stories, how we talk to people, how we interview people, how we navigate our work as journalists, and also just sort of how we navigate online.
I am definitely not one to be a scolder or a child by any means, but just it is also self-evident that sometimes the online world brings out the worst impulses in us and brings out the very true, just the worst reaction. It’s very easy to be very reactionary online, especially if you feel fronted in some way, but in the same way that you wouldn’t want to really be piled upon either online, you’d reckon the person on the other side of the screen probably wouldn’t either, and it’s surely not going to get you anywhere. It might feel good in the moment, but that in its own kind of lets you see people less as human and more as people you just got to be ready to go to combat with. And that again, in a lot of ways, violence begets violence. And then if we’re going to build a world for which there’s less of that, you sometimes got to be a little less combative yourself, which is not easy, especially we’re all subject to it. But those are some things that come to mind for me,
Stephen Janis:
Which is not easy when we’re talking about the death of a CEO E and then the reaction to it. I mean, what you say really brings up the complexity of the issue and how difficult it is just to navigate this, to think, to parse the people’s anger from the actual suffering of a human being, no matter how we feel about what that person did with their lives.
Taya Graham:
And I think you made several excellent points. I mean, something I had to learn even just in the process of becoming a journalist is that there really was no objectivity with a capital O. And I realized in this new space of independent journalism that I was in is that being transparent saying, look, we all admit that every one of us has a lived experience and that is going to affect how we view this world. So let me just be transparent about where I’m coming from, and that way I’m giving you the respect to judge for yourself and decide and look directly at what I’m doing. And I feel like our attempt to do so with our police accountability reporting, I think, I think people really appreciate that respect that we’re giving them by being transparent about who we are.
Stephen Janis:
To that end, I think on a very practical level, given all the people that have responded just to our meager posts about experiences they’ve had, we should just run a 24 hour seven channel with people talking about what they’ve experienced with this healthcare system.
Taya Graham:
Well, I
Stephen Janis:
Really
Taya Graham:
Did consider that we should do a show just all healthcare all the time, honestly.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, no, we talked about that a while ago because we had so many stories and people contacting us and saying, this happened to me. It was more so than police, bad police encounters.
Taya Graham:
That’s true.
Stephen Janis:
So to me it’s like, well, one thing we can do in journalism is just amplify the stories of the people that suffer from the system and just keep running it until somebody pays attention.
Taya Graham:
I think our editor in chief might be listening to that. Be
Stephen Janis:
Careful. Oh yeah, he just gave me a thumbs up. So again, he seems happy for now. But anyway, listen, we really want to thank you. Yes, you were incredible. And I think I love the fact that you brought up some of the metaphysical and philosophical aspects of this, which we should all pay attention to, just human empathy for everyone and some of the parallels between what we consider to be empathetic and what is not, which is clearly like when you said digitalization, which I did read that article, it seems like madness when you see what’s going on in Gaza versus, so I really appreciate you bringing that context to this discussion.
Taya Graham:
Thank you so much, premier, it is a pleasure to meet you. We
Stephen Janis:
Hope we have you on again soon.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
Please thank you so much and keep much the great
Prem Thakker:
Work both. I appreciate both of you and the work that you guys do. Very much so. It’s really a treat to be joining you guys. Great. Great.
Taya Graham:
All right. Well then we’re going to hold you to coming back,
Prem Thakker:
Please.
Taya Graham:
Great.
Prem Thakker:
All right.
Taya Graham:
So just once again, I want to reiterate how much I appreciate both our guest Kat Abu and Prem Thakker for joining us and sharing their insights. And I really hope they’ll both be back to join us again soon. And remember, you can follow Kat’s work on Zeteo and a Mother Jones, and she’s got her own TikTok channel. Prem’s work is on EO where we mentioned the article that he wrote. He’s got plenty of other work there as well.
Speaker 8:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
Subtext with prem. So we might have some links dropped in the chat for you to look at. And I just wanted to just throw, just because I keep my eye on the live chat, I just want people to know I’m paying attention. Hi, Michael Willis. Hi Lacey. RI see you guys. Thank you for joining us. So lemme just throw up a couple comments for you to take a look at.
Stephen Janis:
Sure.
Taya Graham:
You don’t like my music set, I just have my hip replaced for free in the US It would’ve cost 30,000 to 40 grand concern, said the citizens in this country will go down in history as having the greatest amount of learned helplessness,
Speaker 8:
Which
Taya Graham:
I thought was a very interesting comment. Here we have Ramin Ives, and I do apologize if I’m not pronouncing the avatar names correctly, the widespread frustrations, denied claims, exorbitant costs and systemic corruption reflect a healthcare industry, prioritizing profit over people. Let me see here. You don’t like my music again, says I’m so sick of this left versus right bs. I want human rights. Any quality.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, is there any more?
Taya Graham:
Oh yeah, just a few more. Once upon a time said, won’t someone please think of the CEOs, I think was a response to some of the Cuomo and Shapiro’s takes. And Michael Willis noted, pulled out the same quote that really stuck with me,
Stephen Janis:
Be
Taya Graham:
Kind with people, be ruthless with systems. Wow, isn’t that powerful?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah,
Taya Graham:
I thought that was really
Stephen Janis:
Powerful. Well, it kind of reminds me of David Grabber talking about the sociology of indifference, how bureaucracies create this kind of violence of indifference to people who need help. And it’s always going to be there in some form or another, but it seems like other countries have learned how to do it better than we have. And I think that becomes irrational, right? It makes us irrational because there’s no good reason for us to suffer like this. And so I just still can’t get over the Democrats and their responsiveness and their lack of their tone deafness and how they just, people got paid so much money to be stupid, just professionally stupid about this and not this issue and how it’s been painted is medical has been painted as radical.
Taya Graham:
Why
Stephen Janis:
Isn’t the healthcare system denies care for profit radical? Why isn’t that radical? That seems much more radical on a common sense level, and I think that’s why people are so angry. Common sense. That’s radical to have a system in the wealthiest country in the world where you can die and go broke getting sick, that’s pretty radical. Medicare for all is pretty sensible, not radical.
Taya Graham:
I think
Stephen Janis:
That’s great one. We should remind people of that.
Taya Graham:
I think that’s an excellent point. And I think Vincent Massey actually made a good point
Stephen Janis:
Here
Taya Graham:
Saying 68,000 Americans die each year due to preventable sickness caused by the for-profit healthcare insurance industry. Their source, the Lancet, which is a medical journal.
Speaker 8:
So
Taya Graham:
Case closed is what they said here. So I just want to let you know that I appreciate you so much, everyone that was in the chat, everyone that was having such a fruitful conversation that we really do appreciate you joining us. And now I’m going to take a moment where I do a little speechifying and I’m also going to take the time to, I look
Stephen Janis:
Forward to it every
Taya Graham:
Time. I hope so. Is that that sarcasm again?
Stephen Janis:
No, no, I’m not being sarcastic.
Taya Graham:
Okay. Just
Stephen Janis:
Checking. I just want people to know I’m not a sarcastic person.
Taya Graham:
Okay.
Stephen Janis:
I said that one thing that sounded a little sarcastic and now everyone’s branded me because you did
Taya Graham:
Sarc me
Stephen Janis:
For a sec.
Taya Graham:
Was just checking.
Stephen Janis:
I
Taya Graham:
Was just checking. And also at the very end, I’m going to include one or two of the YouTube community posts because I did ask for your thoughts. And I want you to know when I do a YouTube community post, I do pay attention to what you write me and I will be in the comment section later as well, just in case people want to continue the conversation. Alright. Here’s my little speech. I am not a healthcare expert or an academic, but like most of my fellow Americans, my personal experience with the healthcare system has taught me plenty. I remember my mother spending hours on the phone attempting to get just an iota of reimbursement for the healthcare I needed. And I literally wouldn’t be sitting here today if she hadn’t fought so hard for my mental healthcare treatment. So let me state it in the simplest way possible how I see the problem.
We pay money every month into a risk pool that’s supposed to cover us when we need a doctor or treatment. But the insurance companies turn that very reasonable idea on its head instead of ensuring that we have access to what we need when we need it. They use algorithms and bureaucratic indifference to keep it, or actually I really should say, to steal it. And their indifference creates billions in profits for shareholders and for CEOs. And it is a uniquely grotesque scenario, delaying and denying coverage and healthcare profits to procure obscene profits all while we watch our loved ones wither and sicken and pain and confusion, fearful of dying and leaving us with a financial burden. Some families have continued to spend the rest of their lives paying off. So let me just read you some of the people that reached out to us via the YouTube community post on our channel who wanted to share their stories of their interactions with the healthcare community.
So I have from Bubs, Bubs 3, 3, 5, 6. Two years ago, I was slotted for back surgery to alleviate weakness and extreme pain. Less than 12 hours before I was scheduled to arrive, I got a call that BCBS denied my claim based on three criteria that were blatantly false. Luckily for me, I’m an RN and understood the language they used and was able to appeal it and have it reversed. But my procedure was delayed weeks and required numerous more appointments and copays. I thought a lot about people who perhaps didn’t read well or understand healthcare, who might just give up. And that was my first thought when I saw this news. And now I’m going to share a post that I think speaks to a pain that too many of us can understand. And it’s from most over 7, 9, 7 4. My sister told me she needed $30,000 to continue treatment.
She took her own life the day before she turned 65. And this particular comment just really broke my heart because I actually know people I love who would rather end their lives than be what they think is a burden to their family. And no one should ever have to feel that way. So now I have a screenshot of another comment from Ms. Penelope, 6, 3, 7 4. And she writes, being a good parent to your children does not cancel out or alleviate the evil decisions and actions made in one other arenas of life, particularly impacting millions of innocent people. The decisions of this person should never be forgotten. Human rights violations of such magnitude denying basic healthcare must be competently and thoroughly prosecuted. This is Marcus Aelius, 7 0 3 9 UHC, which is UnitedHealthcare denied me a CAT scan for lung damage post covid. And the last one is from Mr.
Sprint Cat. My father, 90 years old had a hematoma removed from his leg, walked after the surgery, doctor decided to put him in rehab, never walked again. Now they send bills, paid this by the end of the month. The highest bill so far is $3,000. How is an elderly person on a fixed income going to pay for that by the end of the month? What an impossible situation for someone to be put in draining someone of all their resources. So not only do they have nothing to leave their family, but they will be put so far in debt, they could lose everything and put their family in debt as well. Personally, I just don’t understand how someone can turn their back on people in pain like this and how the profit motive can harden your heart so that you simply can’t hear people’s cries for help.
And this is the soul consolation I’ve had is that for the first time since the election, I have heard my fellow Americans united on an issue that this system needs to change. So what can we do? Well, first we’ve got to acknowledge that both parties ignore this issue, which begs the question and why would they ignore this issue around which the working class us average citizens are actually united? And I think I know it’s because this issue of all issues points out the one truism of politics that the elites want us to ignore. The one thing we all have in common with each other and not with them, the system they created is meant to enrich them at our expense. And yes, sometimes actually kill us so they can profit. And they know if we figure this out together and come together that they are in trouble.
I mean, there will be no yacht big enough, no bunker remote enough, no hedge fund will be wealthy enough to stop people from taking power back through activism and protest and better policies. And that’s why they don’t bring up issues. They bring up issues like the culture wars because truthfully, they’d rather have us fight each other and snipe at each other over little things that don’t matter, instead of focusing on how they rip us off day in and day out. And let me be clear, life and death should never be line items on a balance sheet. Pain and suffering shouldn’t be a revenue stream and premature death should not be a cash cow. But there’s another truism about the issue that is even more potent. We can change this. We just have to have the will and the willingness to work together. Now, in one of our previous show, we created a category for billionaires.
And one of those categories was the conflict billionaire, the uber wealthy who actually get rich while we literally fight each other on their social media platforms. They sow discord. So we can’t think they create hatred so we won’t unite and they make a fortune on the synergy of the conflict. But if we want healthcare, it’s time to cast aside their social engineering. It’s time to stop filling their pockets while we empty ours. And it’s time to take the energy dunking on each other and owning each other and instead demand an equitable system for all, not just the few. And there are many people, including as Stephen mentioned, governor Josh Shapiro, who think it’s undignified to raise critiques of a cruel system after a man was shot dead. Be has not said a word about the cruel system that will literally deny care to a dying patient, make that thousands of dying patients who might have lived with the right care. So at least for now, let’s acknowledge the truth about this country and our healthcare that these elites want us to ignore. It is simply unacceptable and the people refuse to accept it anymore. Stephen,
Is there anything you would like to add to that?
Stephen Janis:
I’m not following up your amazing rant too. I think I said enough at this point,
Taya Graham:
But
Stephen Janis:
I appreciate everyone watching and sharing.
Taya Graham:
Well, thank you. I just wanted to make sure to say hi to Lacey R, our mods for help, and I want to thank everyone. I think I even saw David Boron out there, one of our cop watcher friends from our police accountability reporting. So I just wanted to say I see you all out there and I appreciate you so much and hopefully I’ll see you in the comments later. Also, all the people who reached out with sharing these stories, they can be difficult to share. They’re so
Speaker 8:
Personal
Taya Graham:
And we want to thank you so much for doing so.
Speaker 8:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
And of course, again, I have to thank Kat Abu and Prem Thakker and Professor Jeff Singer.
Stephen Janis:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
And of course the help of my real news colleagues, Kayla, Jocelyn, Adam, Cameron, David, and of course our editor in Chief Max Alvarez,
Stephen Janis:
Who I would say I’ve been monitoring the whole time. Yes,
Taya Graham:
You’ve been keeping a close eye on
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, it’s kind of tough because
Taya Graham:
You, okay, I look forward
Stephen Janis:
To your report. I look at your facial expressions. I’m like, uhoh, we need to veer a little this way.
Taya Graham:
Okay. I look forward to your full report later.
Stephen Janis:
Yes, I will give it to you.
Taya Graham:
And thank you all for watching, and if I don’t get a chance to see you before then, have a happy holiday or a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and be safe out there. Thanks for joining us.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has said that the public’s reaction to the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare over the past week is a stark “reflection” of the “broken” U.S. health care system — and a show that Americans are ready for a political party that prioritizes the needs of the working class and champions policies like Medicare for All. In a Jacobin interview published Wednesday…
The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has profound implications for Black women. The decision effectively removed the federal constitutional right to abortion, allowing states to set their own abortion laws. It denies women the human right of bodily autonomy, a cornerstone of self-determination.
The concept of “States Rights” emerged in debates over the balance of power in the U.S. Constitution (1787), a strong central government versus states’ rights to guard against “federal overreach.”
The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 has sparked a reaction that few may have suspected. The perpetrator has received an outpouring of popular support, and a profound debate on the brutality of the US for-profit healthcare system has been sparked, with many accusing healthcare corporations of reaping their profits directly from human misery.
Thompson was shot and killed while heading to an investors meeting in Midtown Manhattan on December 4. Police have arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in connection with the crime, who quickly has become a working class hero in the eyes of many in the US public, especially after his alleged manifesto revealed that he was motivated by outrage towards healthcare corporations.
A day after Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged as the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on Tuesday published what he said was the 26-year-old’s highly reported on manifesto.
The existence of the handwritten document found on Mangione when he was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Monday was confirmed by the New York Police Department, and major media outlets have quoted from it, but none had released it in full.
“My queries to The New York Times, CNN, and ABC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered,” Klippenstein said on his Substack.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson — a brazen assassination of a wealthy CEO in the streets of midtown Manhattan — shocked the United States. But the tsunami of mass anger unleashed against a hated for-profit health care system has so far defined the story in the news. The killing sparked a deluge of personal testimonies of horrifying experiences with health insurance corporations.
On Monday, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In the days following the December 4 shooting, the unknown assailant who gunned down Thompson became a floating signifier in the public imagination. Angry and frustrated people nationwide channeled their politics, grievances, and outrage into speculations about the killer’s ideology and…