I just read Bobby Harrison’s column. He hesitantly raised the specter of the need for universal paid (or partly paid) health care. I think he is right, but this is a complete non-starter. It is not the Jews who rule America; it is insurance companies. Insurance companies own over 12% of all other listed companies. That is enough to place a significant number of people on those companies’ boards. This may end if climate-change disasters bankrupt them, but they are already doing pre-emptive strikes to prevent that (e.g., refusing to cover flooding events). Politicians, especially GOP politicians,  live or die based on the support of the insurance industry, so they will put no toe in those waters.

It seems to me that the conservative view is that if you or your family cannot afford the costs of staying alive — food, doctors, shelter — then you must die. In the 1920’s, before the great depression, more than two hundred people per day were found dead on the streets of New York alone from exposure or starvation. The 1930’s, of course, were worse. FDR and the Democrats won a Congressional super-majority as a result and created our social safety net. The GOP has done everything they can to destroy that net ever since. Here in Mississippi, our GOP state legislature has resolutely refused to expand Medicaid, so I see no chance of even insurance subsidies in our state, much less Medicare for all. As it goes here, so it will surely go in Congress as long as the GOP holds on.

When the subsidies to the Affordable Care Act expire and premiums explode, people will start to die from lack of care; but as Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said in response to Medicaid cuts: “Well, we are all going to die.”

Bill Gillmore

Columbus

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