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TMI Show Ep 33: “Deny, Defend, Depose”: Health insurance Horror Stories

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Ted Rall

The assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has shocked the nation, not because of the killing itself, but rather due to the widespread and gleeful public reaction to it. As the manhunt continues, social media and mainstream media comment sections are full of horror stories of desperately-ill people and their loved ones attempting to navigate a byzantine health insurance system designed to thwart easy access to medical care and payments to doctors.

Co-host Manila Chan is out today, suffering from pneumonia as well as the vicissitudes of the healthcare system—she got worse because she couldn’t get easy access to antibiotics. Holding down the fort with co-host Ted Rall is TMI Show producer Robby West, who “enjoys” a front row seat amid the chaos and cruelty that is America’s healthcare system.

Democrats Haven’t Really Won a Presidential Campaign Since 2012

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Ted Rall

Obama Wins | UCLA Bunche Center            As Democrats survey their recent losses in the election, they should avoid drawing conclusions or floating prescriptions for fixing their party’s problems. First, they should absorb the biggest data point that is currently being ignored by both the progressive and the corporatist wings of the party: they haven’t really won a presidential election since 2012. No, 2020 doesn’t count. Not really. Read on.

Democrats don’t yet recognize it, but they have effectively messed up three consecutive elections against Donald Trump. This points less to a divided country wobbling back-and-forth between two parties than to a systemic realignment in favor of the Republicans. For Democrats, this suggests a serious set of systemic problems unlikely to be fixable by nipping and tucking messaging and candidate presentation.

            I am not an election denialist. Trump officially lost in 2020. But Biden, doddering even at the time as he campaigned from his basement, didn’t really win.

            Covid shaped that race in two significant ways. Donald Trump committed political suicide in both. Trump’s unforced errors in 2020 were so easily foreseen and so bizarre that it’s hard to imagine another candidate ever committing political malpractice to such an extreme.  Of course Democrats were able to beat him then.

            It was a weird election.

            First Trump shot himself in both feet with Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership launched between March and May 2020, at the start of the lockdown. Epidemiologists and ordinary citizens alike fantasized about developing a vaccine, but experts cautioned that it would take ages. “Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months,” the New York Times reported on April 30, 2020. “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years—more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.”

            “Never succeed” succeeded. Relying on emergency use authorizations and conditional approvals, the first vaccines became available to the public starting December 11, 2020. By April, anyone who wanted one could get one—a mere year after Warp Speed began.

            This was a miracle. A study by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that the vaccines prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans. They saved the budget $1.15 trillion through November 2022.

            Fast action to develop vaccines, something a more conventional politician like his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton might have been hesitant to approve without additional testing prior to approval, was Trump’s greatest accomplishment during his first term. Best of all from a political standpoint, timing made it the mother of all October surprises—had Trump chosen to run with it. The president could have informed a traumatized electorate a few weeks before election day that they would be inoculated against the deadly coronavirus, not four or more years in the future, but mere weeks or months away.

            Insanely, Trump ran away from his big win. To be sure, Trump did announce that vaccines were on the way. But he did so in an uncharacteristically muted manner. His highest-profile and highest-volume pandemic messaging, influenced by his wacky supporters and political allies, many of whom subscribed to unorthodox medical views including anti-vaxxers and those who thought Covid was a hoax, deteriorated into an incoherent morass that understated the impact, including the number of deaths. “That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on October 24, 2020. “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.” On October 26, he continued to downplay the scale of the pandemic as a “Fake News Media Conspiracy,” saying the U.S. had the most cases on earth only because “we TEST, TEST, TEST.”

            Thanks in large part to Trump, however, Covid vaccines were the fastest ever created. Due to internal GOP politics, however, Trump felt compelled to run away from Operation War Speed and, in doing so, threw away his best issue. An October 2020 Reuters-Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on his handling of the coronavirus crisis, with 37% approving and 59% disapproving. It was though FDR had denied having anything to do with the New Deal when he ran for reelection in 1936 and gotten dinged for making the Depression worse.

            Similarly inexplicable and tied to the vagaries of paranoid right-of-center internecine discussions, Trump repeatedly advised his supporters not to cast an early vote before election day or vote by mail, alternatives that exploded in popularity due to the pandemic lockdown, on the ground that they were rife with fraud. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020. “And, you know, when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple—whether they counterfeit them, forge them, do whatever you want. It’s a very serious problem,” he said in September 2020.      

            46% of ballots were cast via early or mail-in voting in 2020, double the result for four years earlier. But only 62% of Trump voters voted early or by mail, compared to 82% for Biden.

            It was an incredibly stupid mistake. It wasn’t one that the Trump campaign repeated this year.  

            Democrats convinced themselves that their 2016 loss was a fluke attributable to sexism, Russian interference and the novelty of Donald Trump, celebrity and TV star, as their opponent. They took comfort in the fact that Trump had been defeated in 2020 and therefore possibly would be again.

What they failed to grasp what is that the real anomaly here was 2020. Had Trump exploited the triumph of Operation Warp Speed and encouraged his supporters to cast early and mail-in ballots—any vote, any time, is a good vote—he would almost certainly have beat Biden. They foolishly assumed that Trump learned nothing from his previous campaign, that he would not correct his mistakes.

            For the first time since 1892, we now have a presidential candidate who ran in three consecutive elections, largely on the same issues, the border and the economy. Trump won twice and lost once, but that once was due to his suicidal moves. Whatever Democrats decide to do to try to become stronger and more viable going forward, they need to understand that they haven’t had a strong enough candidate to beat a real Republican running a normal campaign in a conventional presidential campaign since Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

DMZ America Podcast Ep 182: United CEO Killed: Vigilantism or Justifiable Homicide?

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Ted Rall

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) dig into the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Does the misery intrinsic to the profit model of companies like United Healthcare justify violent acts like this in a society where there is little recourse for justice? Or is taking the law into your own hands always inherently wrong? And is there any chance that corporate America might start to rethink its rapacious business practices?

TMI Show Ep 32: Did Brian Thompson Have It Coming?

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Ted Rall

Yesterday morning the 50-year-old CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot to death on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. Even including the reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden, it’s hard to think of another high-profile murder that has been greeted with as much glee and schadenfreude by the American public.

Comments sections in news stories and social media were filled with comments about how Brian Thompson had it coming, hopefully this is the first of many, and countless jokes about the bullet that killed him being a pre-existing condition. Almost no one expressed sympathy. TMI Show co-host Ted Rall and, filling in for Manila Chan, producer Robby West, explore this remarkable phenomenon.

United Healthcare is one of the most hated big companies in the United States, in large part because it denies its customers claims at a higher percentage rate than any other insurer. Thompson, paid over $10 million a year, was a poster boy for an industry whose profit model relied upon making people sick and dead to maximize earnings. The hatred was internal as well as external: even as company executives raised their own pay, they laid off thousands of their own workers.

Adding to the intrigue, Thompson was being investigated by the Justice Department over a $15 million sale of United stock suspected as insider trading, and which caused a selloff.

What was the motivation behind the assassination? Will other healthcare executives reconsider their business practices? Or will they just hire additional security? Could this help to spark a national conversation about for-profit healthcare? One thing is for sure: it is 100% clear of that Americans of all political stripes hate the healthcare industry. Because in America, whether you have insurance or not, you don’t get healthcare.

TMI Show Ep 31: Can Putin Save Syria? An Exclusive from Inside Aleppo

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Ted Rall

Scarcely noticed by most of the world, the Civil War in Syria has been grinding on for more than a decade. A proxy war, with the central government of Bashar al-Assad, supported by its traditional ally Russia (along with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon) against an assortment of radical jihadi militias, including remnants of Al Qaeda supported by the United States under cover of going after the terrorist group ISIS, the balance of power had remained relatively stable at the front lines despite the threat of total fragmentation as Syria’s Kurds seized their own autonomous zone—until a couple of weeks ago.

Now an Al Qaeda affiliate called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies have launched an offensive that shocked the world by capturing the second largest city in Syria, Aleppo.

The TMI Show brings you an EXCLUSIVE look from directly inside HTS-occupied Syria with Steven Sahiounie, a Syrian national and journalist in Aleppo.

What is it like to live under HTS control? How likely are they to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus? What would be the regional and global implications of a radical jihadi state on the border with Israel? The United States has been trying to persuade al-Assad to abandon his allies Russia and Iran, but has so far failed. Is that likely to change? Can Russia, trying to close the deal in Ukraine, divert resources to save the Syrian government?

The TMI Show Ep 30: “Meet the Lawmakers”

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Ted Rall

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case with broad potential implications for transgender people in the United States. US v. Skrmetti, brought by the Biden administration for trans youth, seeks to overturn Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender children and slaps doctors who provide that care with civil penalties. The government argues that transgender people are covered under the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

A win for the Volunteer State defendant would likely set a precedent that would support restrictions on transgender people in health care whether they can use restrooms or play sports on teams corresponding to their gender identity.Meanwhile, transgender politics have been prominent in the recent election. Missoulans returned transgender Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who was blocked from speaking on the floor of the state legislature, to her office.

And in January, Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride will make history in congressional representation, becoming the first openly transgender individual to serve in Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson subsequently issued a ban on transgender women like McBride from using women’s bathrooms in the Capitol.

As America heads into conservative-dominated government, what will the clash between the MAGA movement and an increasingly assertive transgender movement look like?

DMZ America Podcast Ep 181: Democrats Take Stock; Hunter Biden Pardoned

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Ted Rall

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by syndicated columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune to discuss the despondent state of the Democratic Party in the wake of their defeat. Progressives like Bernie Sanders say the party erred in neglecting the working class, moderates think the party appears too “woke” for mainstream Americans and it’s hard to reconcile Biden and the Democrats’ criticism of Donald Trump as dishonest with his decision to pardon Hunter Biden despite numerous categorical denials that he would do so. Where does the Democratic Party go from here? Is “resistance” possible and, if so, what will it look like?

The TMI Show Ep 29: “Hunter Biden Pardoned Despite President’s Repeated Promises”

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Ted Rall

President Joe Biden and his press secretary and other surrogates have repeatedly told the media that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden on federal tax evasion and gun charges under any circumstance whatsoever. Nothing has substantially changed, yet the president has gone ahead and issued the most controversial presidential pardon since Gerald Ford let Richard Nixon off the hook. Moreover, he has used language familiar to those who follow President-elect Donald Trump to excuse his brazen self dealing and lying, justifying his actions by accusing the Department of Justice of having been politicized.

What does it mean when the standard bearer of the Democrats, who claim that they differ from Trump because they are truth tellers, is so willing to make a mockery of the truth? What message are we to take from the fact that both political parties say that the DOJ is politically compromised? What if anything does this do to the Democratic Party brand? What should go Biden have done differently?

Attorney and historian Tyler Nixon joins the TMI Show’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan to discuss the political and cultural implications of the Hunter Biden pardon.

Put the Planet First

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Ted Rall

           We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by, especially by, those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)

            One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.

            Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free healthcare cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.

            Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that—we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.

            Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least three to six percent organic matter. But forty percent of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over nine billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits—an essential move toward saving ourselves—there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.

            Thirty percent of the world’s commercially-fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions—or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.

            So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to ten percent of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.

“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Millions of Genghis Khan’s chomped their way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.

            A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a six percent chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100 and a ten percent chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill ten percent of global population. (World War II killed under four percent.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.

            Many climate experts say that the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”

Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” A cyclone might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.

A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a six percent probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.

            The U.S. and other nations—but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example—should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:

            In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

The TMI Show Ep 28: “Turkey’s Perspective on Trump, NATO, Ukraine”

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Ted Rall

By dint of geography, history, culture and human evolution, Turkey is one of the most influential nations in the world and certainly that’s the case throughout Asia. The trade and cultural gateway between Europe and Asia, Turkey has recently taken a light authoritarian and nationalist turn under the presidency of Reyup Erdogan, who has been serving as president for the last decade.

As Donald Trump prepares to return to the American presidency, there has been speculation that Erdogan’s natural stylistic affinity to Trump may draw him closer to the United States as Turkey — like all countries between great powers — balances the US and its European allies against Russia and perhaps even plays them off against each other. On the other hand, Russia has gained the upper hand in Ukraine. And Trump seems to want to end the Russo-Ukrainian War. Then there’s the country’s complicated relationship with Europe: it’s been a member of NATO since 1995 but its application to join the EU has stalled since Erdogan became president.

Dr. Hasan Ünal, professor at Baskent University in Ankara, has published extensively on Turkish foreign policy-related matters. He joins TMI Show hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan to explore Turkey’s dilemma: East or West? Which to Choose?

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