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TMI Show Ep 36: “Health Insurance Horror Stories”

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Ted Rall

The shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has sparked a national conversation about the state of healthcare in the United States. The accused shooter, Luigi Mangione, allegedly wrote a manifesto in which he pointed out that the U.S. has low life expectancy despite paying the highest costs for healthcare in the world. And he appears to have lit a fuse as “Wanted” posters have gone up on the city streets depicting other health insurance company executives accused of putting profits before their clients’ health at the same time Thompson’s bereaved family laid one of the most despised dead people in America to rest.

“The TMI Show”’s resident leftist Ted Rall, guest co-host Robby West and guest Steve Gill, a conservative talk host, discuss Health Insurance Horror Stories, the future of for-profit healthcare under Trump and what, if anything, could be done to reduce Americans’ anger at a system that ought to be helping them.

We Hate Health Insurance Companies. 3 Reforms Would Help.

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Ted Rall

           The arrest of a suspect in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan leaves some questions unanswered. But the gleeful reaction to the executive’s slaying leaves nothing subject to interpretation. Many Americans feel that they have been treated so shabbily by the health insurance industry that they despise it and want their leaders to die—and they’ve been willing to say so loudly and publicly.

            I’m 61. I can’t recall the demise of any public figure being greeted with as much glee and dark humor, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. Which makes psychological sense. If someone is trying to kill you, you hate them.

            Health insurance companies are trying to kill us.

While Americans were shocked and some even traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, most individuals didn’t feel personally threatened, much less harmed, by Al Qaeda. On the other hand an insurer like United, which is reported to deny a whopping 32% of in-network claims, wields the power to overrule doctor’s orders, harass sick people at their most vulnerable and, given the sky-high health costs in this country, put medical treatment—the ultimate non-discretionary expense—out of reach. Rare is the health insurance customer who can’t tell a horror story of being unfairly turned down for reimbursement for a doctor’s visit or procedure, usually after being given the runaround over pre-authorizations, procedural codes, doctors erroneously listed as in network, and other Soviet-style nonsense.

Sometimes health insurers decide that people—people like you—shouldn’t receive life-saving care. Patients die every year due to the health insurance industry’s sinister profit model, which heavily relies upon quotas for automatic and in many cases automated denials.

            Even when health insurance works as advertised, it feels like a scam. You pay a monthly premium yet, even when you have a legitimate claim, you probably won’t be able to collect a reimbursement due to high deductibles that can exceed $10,000 a year. Insurers’ online directories of in-network health providers are years out of date; most of the doctors listed no longer accept the company’s insurance (or never did), have moved their practices, or are retired or deceased. “In a 2023 analysis, researchers surveyed nearly 450,000 physicians in the Medicare provider database that appeared in online physician directories for UnitedHealth, Elevance, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana,” Jacobin reported. “They found that only 19 percent had consistent addresses and specialty information across all the directories in which they were found.” (Failing to keep these lists up-to-date is illegal under the 2022 No Surprises Act (NSA), but the federal law is not enforced.)

There ought to be more difference between the experience of being uninsured and paying for insurance.

Health insurance companies create misery that feels intensely personal. The fact that a procedure or medication ordered by your physician, whom you know and has examined you personally, can be overruled by an anonymous individual who has never laid eyes upon you in a completely opaque process can be maddening. Insurers want to make more money and are willing for you and your loved ones to suffer great pain, and perhaps even death, in order to maximize revenues.

“Our role is a critical role, and we make sure that care is safe, appropriate, and is delivered when people need it,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty reassured employees in an internal video following Thompson’s killing. “We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable.” He hasn’t learned a thing.

This, of course, is bullshit. Companies like UnitedHealthcare are leeches, a net negative to the patient experience. No one believes they are “guarding” us against any danger whatsoever. They aren’t fighting “complexity;” they are the complexity. They add an additional, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy between sick people and healthcare providers, with only one goal: profits.

The obvious solution is to abolish the medical insurance industry and join the 69% of the world’s population that has some form of universal healthcare. For the foreseeable future, however, massive donations by the health insurance lobby both to Democrats and Republicans make it highly unlikely that something like Medicare For All, popular among  voters of both parties, will be enacted anytime soon. 

Still, the staggering hatred by health insurance consumers for the current system creates a political opportunity for the politician or party willing to push through three simple reforms to protect health insurance consumers from the industry’s most predatory practices.

First, if a physician is listed as a member of a health insurance company’s network, an insured patient’s experience should be frictionless. In network, no claim for a visit, test, procedure or medication should ever be denied. Pre-authorizations should never be required.

Second, if an insurer believes that one of its network member physicians is overprescribing or otherwise abusing the system, the dispute should be resolved between the insurance company and the doctor. An insurer can sue a rogue doctor, kick them out of their network, whatever, but leave sick patients out of it.

Third, failure to update lists of in-network physicians should inconvenience the insurance company that fails to fulfill its responsibilities and comply with federal law, not those of us who are seeking medical care. We deserve truth in advertising. If an insurer lists a doctor as being in-network on their website or elsewhere, patients should be reimbursed for visiting that doctor under the doctrine.

As President-elect Trump formulates his policies for his second term, I hope that his powerful instinct when it comes to gauging public opinion has taken note of our hatred of the for-profit health insurance industry. Pushing through these three reforms would enjoy bipartisan support and begin to fulfill his pledge to fix the badly-broken American healthcare system.

(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?

Don’t Negotiate Against Yourselves, Lefties

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Ted Rall

           Anyone who has experience haggling at a flea market has intuited the basics of negotiating. If a seller offers the item you want at a fire-sale price that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere, smile, pay the asking price and walk away before they change their mind. If the requested price is many times higher than you’re willing to pay, just walk away. Stratospheric pricing pretty much eliminates the odds that you’ll be able to come to terms. Your time is better spend haggling with a different vendor. In other cases, offer a low-ball rate and work toward middle ground.

            In politics, liberals tend to negotiate against themselves. Rather than pushing for radical change, Democrats begin with an incrementalist approach that factors in their conservative opponents’ counteroffer and begins from there. Since the Right is aggressive, they push back to the point that the resulting change is a smaller improvement that, in many cases, is so tiny as to be a rounding error. Obama’s opening gambit in the healthcare reform debate illustrates this phenomenon.

            We know what we wound up with: Obamacare, originally developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a free-market scheme that prioritizes insurance-company profits, relies on economies of scale and assumes robust competition will reduce costs. (In practice, the healthcare business is de facto monopolized to the extent that there is little downward pressure on prices. The industry is disincentivized to participate in the public sector to the point that only a small fraction of the health plans available individually and via private employers can be purchased in the ACA’s online marketplace.)

            The point is how the ACA as we know it came to pass. Obama, wielding considerable political capital at the start of his first term, decided to make healthcare reform his first major legislative priority. The public, long struggling under high costs for medical care and prescription pharmaceuticals, was supportive across party lines.

            Right out of the gate, Obama negotiated against himself. Though he had promised during this campaign that the ACA would include a “public option,” i.e. the right to join what Bernie Sanders called Medicare For All, he agreed to drop it from the bill because, Democrats explained, they were short one vote in the Senate. Joe Lieberman, a right-wing independent senator from Connecticut, home to many of the nation’s major insurers, threatened to scuttle the measure via a filibuster parliamentary maneuver.

            Rather than force Lieberman and his Republican allies to go on the record as having rejected a popular bill on a major issue, Obama dropped the public option. Obama noted the public option “has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right.” Anyway, he lied, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” Good news: the ACA passed. But the lack of a public option was so unpopular (88% of Democrats wanted one) that it was a significant factor behind Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign in 2016. Instead of a towering achievement, Obamacare is widely viewed as a disappointment. The vast majority of Americans say its failure left the problem unsolved.

            Shortly before he left office, Obama suggested that Congress add a public option to the ACA. This is what happens when you negotiate against yourself.

            The 38% of Americans who oppose capitalism—socialists, communists, left libertarians and others to the Left of the Democratic Party—should take careful note of the Democrats’ repeated refusals to seek big changes and the subsequent failures that have followed as a result. Unlike the Democrats, who negotiate in Congress against Republicans who share their basic political values and assumptions on the relationship between workers and their labor, militarism and social priorities, we on the actual Left are fighting to overturn the system entirely.

            Our goal is Revolution. But we are completely, for the time being, disorganized. There is no viable leftist political party with a revolutionary orientation, no well-funded highly distributed media outlet to disseminate news and opinion with our point of view. We have, not even in the so-called progressive “Squad” in the House of Representatives, zero elected representatives who seek to abolish capitalism and prioritize the needs and desires of the people. Absent these basic organizational structures or an as-yet-undeveloped Internet-driven organizational strategy that short circuits traditional grassroots organizing and agitation strategies, emancipation by revolution will continue to elude us.

            In the meantime, we must lay the groundwork for revolutionary foment. We must, within the constructs and limitations of the current capitalist system, expose the true nature of a government that claims to be by and for the people but is in truth nothing but a Ponzi scheme that extracts wealth upward from the poor and the working class up to the tiny few at the top point of the pyramid. We can and must accomplish this by exposing the system’s internal, self-evident contradictions.

            This begins by asking why the powers that be repeatedly and continuously find billions of dollars for all manner of destructive nonsense—foreign wars, corrupt defense contractors, tax breaks to for-profit corporations—repeatedly and continuously inform us that there is never enough money to satisfy basic human needs.

            We know, when we demand that everyone have enough to eat, that the political elites will refuse or ignore us. We expect, when we demand that everyone be housed, that we will be told to stuff it. We understand, when we demand that a day of work should be paid fairly, that we are asking for something that they will never agree to—indeed, that they cannot because it would destroy them and their self-perceived identity in the power structure.

            We make demands, not because we believe they will be achieved under this fake parliamentary-style democracy, but because they will be unreasonably refused, without just cause. We want people to hear us ask, and hear them say no, over and over in order to expose them and the fundamental nature of their system.

            We are not, therefore, negotiating. We are demanding. Those who demand should appear reasonable. But we must also be ambitious. Our demands should be aggressive enough that we would genuinely be satisfied were we to achieve them and never so modest that there is a chance the ruling classes would ever seriously consider them. 

            Nothing less than a perfect world will do.

(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. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

Culture of Life

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Ted Rall

The right-wingers who comprise the majority of the pro-life movement are only consistent in one respect. On issue after issue, they have no respect for life. Their hypocrisy leads one to suspect that they are more interested in controlling women than saving lives.

When It Cares, the U.S. Government Is Extremely Efficient

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Ted Rall

           As the COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully clear, our healthcare system is a disaster. 12% of Americans are uninsured and 21% are underinsured. Many counties have zero or just one healthcare plan on offer through their local ACA marketplace, so there is no price competition whatsoever. Due to the lack of competition, and price gouging, by for-profit insurers, the average family of four who buys insurance through Obamacare pays a whopping $25,000 a year in premiums and deductibles—more than a third of their income after taxes.

            More than 18,000 Americans die annually due to lack of medical insurance.

            This is very sad, especially for them and their families. But nothing can be done about it. Lame as it is, the Affordable Care Act is as good as it gets. Until the Republicans get back in charge, when they will try to get rid of it again. Political dysfunction, amirite?

            When they care about something, however, the U.S. government can be incredibly efficient.

The U.S. government really cares about war.

Just two days after Russia invaded, President Biden signed a memo authorizing the transfer of $350 million of weapons to Ukraine. Within three weeks, almost all the antitank weapons, kamikaze drones and other war materiel had arrived in Ukraine. That’s less time than it takes first-class mail to get to some places within the United States.

            If you are sick and uninsured, consider a move to Kyiv. As we saw in Afghanistan, U.S. weapons have a habit of disappearing and being sold for profit in war zones. If you still have enough energy and a little luck, you might be able to pilfer one of those American-made radar systems or a few boxes of grenade launchers to finance your chemotherapy. Even if not, Ukraine offers something the United States probably never will: a universal healthcare system.

            Out-of-control college tuition costs have pushed 9 million young borrowers and their families into default on $124 billion in student loans. 80% of these young men and women came from families with total incomes under $40,000; so they’re not deadbeats, they’re poor. The burden of student loan debt hobbles America’s best and brightest just as they are starting out their adult lives. They defer or never purchase homes and cars, and are unable to save for retirement. This hurts the real estate, automobile and durable-goods businesses and turns many talented people into future welfare recipients.

            This is highly unfortunate, especially for them and their families. But nothing can be done about it. Lame as it was, President Biden’s campaign promise to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt was as good as could be hoped for. And he never followed through. Responding to pressure from Republicans and right-wing Democrats, Biden’s latest federal budget, for 2022, doesn’t contain any provisions for student loan forgiveness. They said they were too worried about the deficit.

            Republicans and right-wing Democrats, on the other hand, only worry about the deficit sometimes. Liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans and every other strain of American House representative and Senator quickly approved an additional $13.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine less than a month after the first shipment of cash. There was strong bipartisan support for the measure, which was immediately signed into law by President Biden. Yay, America!

            So don’t despair if you are broke, defaulting on your student loans and unable to escape poverty because even under bankruptcy you can’t get rid of student debt. Scrape up whatever money you still have and hop a plane to Ukraine. Even for non-Ukrainian citizens, total cost of tuition, housing, food, books and other fees at colleges and universities in Ukraine rarely exceed $4000 a year — and they’re usually cheaper. Alternatively, you can try to pass yourself off as Ukrainian at Texas A&M or Hampton University in Virginia, both of which now offer free room, board and tuition to Ukrainian nationals. Americans, of course, need not apply.

            One out of six American children, 12 million total, officially live in poverty. Neither political party seems much to care, and child poverty has not been a major campaign issue in decades. So the problem continues to worsen.

            This is a total bummer, especially for the kids and their families. But nothing can be done about it. Republicans and right-wing Democrats vote against child tax credits, citing the need to balance the budget and concerns that some parents might not use the money to take care of their kids.

            But the budget doesn’t always matter. Nor is careful stewardship of public funds always a priority. When the need is great, both parties come together and overlook such trivialities. President Biden, with the support of Republicans, liberal Democrats and right-wing Democrats, just announced an additional $800 million in military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total to more than $2.5 billion. Who cares if some of that gear winds up in the hands of neo-Nazis? In $100 bills, the cash would weigh 25 tons.

            Those who criticize the United States government as inefficient couldn’t possibly be more mistaken. Congress and the White House are lightning quick and incredibly generous—when it matters.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

When Will Politicians Start Caring about People’s Actual Problems?

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Ted Rall

Paying Higher Taxes for Healthcare | Ted Rall's Rallblog

When you crank out five editorial cartoons and a couple of opinion essays a week, not to mention opining on the radio about this issue and that, it is easy to forget about the basics.

The big issues.

The stuff that really matters to you. It’s just as easy to forget to ask: what are our political leaders doing to address our most pressing problems? This is, after all, their job. It’s what we pay them for.

Pew Research Center pollsters regularly ask Americans what they consider to be the problem that worries them most. On April 15th, the #1 Biggest Problem in America was “the affordability of healthcare.” 56% of respondents called huge medical bills “a very big problem” and 30% said it was “a moderately big problem,” for a total of 86%. That’s pretty much everyone. It even includes people who have “good” insurance through their employers.

“Healthcare costs is the only issue of the 15 asked on the survey seen as a very big problem by a majority of Americans, though about half say that the federal budget deficit (49%), violent crime (48%), illegal immigration (48%) and gun violence (48%) are very big problems,” Pew reported.

This is proof positive. The Affordable Care Act obviously hasn’t fixed the problem it was designed to address, skyrocketing medical expenses. According to Gallup, a whopping 80% of patients still worry a great deal or a fair amount about healthcare costs, a number that has remained essentially unchanged year after year since Obama became president.

What are the two major political parties doing about healthcare costs? Not much.

Democrats think we should be grateful for the crappy system we have now. Three weeks ago the White House announced that President Biden had placed a phone call to Obama to celebrate Obamacare’s tenth anniversary. Biden campaigned on adding a “public option” to the ACA but then left it out of his budget. He floated reducing the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60, then dropped the idea when asked where the money would come from. Democrats have no plans to fix Obamacare; they think it’s perfect as is.

Not that the Republicans are any better.

The Supreme Court ruling in favor of the ACA has forced the GOP to give up on its vague Trump-era “repeal and replace” mantra. Now they’re saying nothing at all. “If the Republicans have a health care agenda, they haven’t shown their cards,” Drew Altman, who runs the Kaiser Family Foundation, recently told Politico. They whine about Obamacare to get votes. But they don’t want to change it.

To recap: Americans worry about high doctors’ bills more than any other single issue. Yet neither party is even talking about, much less trying to actually do, anything to ease our pain. No wonder only 31% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job.

Run down the list of Americans’ other top priorities and you’ll find the same lack of responsiveness from “our” elected officials. Forget actual action. Our “public servants” don’t bother to give us lip service.

So it goes with other Big Worries: no action, no ideas, no hope.

Biden’s coronavirus-recovery and infrastructure spending plans blow up the budget deficit that voters cite as their #2 most worrisome issue; Democrats have no plan to offset their spending by, for example, slashing the constantly bloated Pentagon budget. Republicans, obsessed with social issues, issue easily-ignored boilerplate statements that the deficit is too high that presents “like a rote effort; like Republican karaoke,” as Scott Galupo described it in The Week. Not that Republicans have any credibility on the issue of fiscal responsibility.

On the #3 Big Issue, violent crime, both parties offer, again, nothing. Republicans and Democrats alike are urging municipalities to not defund the police, i.e., they want force levels and tactics to remain where they are now. Neither party offers an alternative or additional approach, like an initiative to increase access to mental-health treatment. In the absence of a new response nothing much will substantially change, as Biden tells donors.

            Neither party has a real plan to address Top Issue #4, illegal immigration, or #5, gun violence. Democrats and Republicans alike intend to leave the southern border partially open in order to allow employers access to cheap labor, while continuing mass deportations to terrorize those workers into accepting slave wages. Neither party wants to do anything substantial about the proliferation of handguns used in the current spasm of violent crime, or question whether we still need the Second Amendment in the 21st century.

My point here is not to discuss the specifics of healthcare, the deficit, crime, etc. or what the best solutions to those problems are. Nor am I out to blame one party more than the other. My point is that neither the president nor Congress nor either of the two major parties is addressing the issues we care about in a credible way. When a political system fails to respond to people’s concerns or even take them seriously in the first place, it is doomed.

No one should be surprised when the whole bankrupt piece of garbage implodes.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Everyone Hates Obamacare. So It’s Working.

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Ted Rall

The Affordable Care Act has achieved a dubious distinction: it has brought Americans together. Conservatives are convinced that it is a bolshevik government takeover of private enterprise. Progressives view it as a sell out to big health insurance companies.

Hold Them Accountable in 2040

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Ted Rall

Once again, Democrats are selling out their progressive voters. This time, Joe Biden says he’s not going to bother trying for a public option on the Affordable Care Act and there’s no sign of any attempt to increase the minimum wage. What will progressive voters do about it? If history serves, probably nothing.

In a Crisis, a Compromise Solution Is Worse Than No Solution at All

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Ted Rall

LTC Plan Design: Half a Loaf is Better Than None - Financial Abundance

            The raging argument on the left between progressives who argue for radical change and centrists who advocate incrementalism is hardly new. Nearly a century ago, progressive titan and Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette and FDR were often at loggerheads over the same question.

Roosevelt, La Follette complained, was too quick to compromise with reactionaries. FDR insisted that “half a loaf is better than no bread.” While that might seem intuitively obvious, La Follette had a ready reply. “Half a loaf, as a rule, dulls the appetite, and destroys the keenness of interest in attaining the full loaf.” That can be dangerous. The average adult male requires approximately 2500 calories of nutrition per day. 1250 is better than 0, but 1250 is still malnutrition that would eventually kill him.

Even in a long-running crisis, the sustained agitation necessary to pressure the political classes into granting concessions doesn’t usually occur before people’s suffering has become acute. If the powers that be provide partial relief in the form of a half-measure that partly alleviates a problem, angry citizens can be persuaded to put down their pitchforks and go home peaceably. Yet the problem persists.

The Affordable Care Act is a perfect example. Obama became president at the peak of a major economic crisis, the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2007-09. With hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs every month, the need for government intervention in the healthcare system was obvious to most Americans. So Obama campaigned on major change that included a public option. Two out of three people, including many Republicans, favored a single-payer system similar to those in many other countries.

Instead, we got the watered-down ACA.

As COVID-19 has made clear, the for-profit American healthcare system is even more scandalously dysfunctional than it was prior to the passage of Obamacare. The ACA “marketplace” has collapsed; many places only offer one “take it or leave it” insurance plan. Nevertheless, healthcare is no longer a top political issue. Support for a public option or Medicare For All has dropped to about 50%. The Democratic Party chose to nominate someone who promised to veto Medicare For All even if both houses of Congress were to pass it.

Tens of thousands of people are still dying every year because they can’t afford to see a doctor. But in too many people’s minds, healthcare was partly solved. So they are no longer demanding improvements. Though it might seem counterintuitive, the politics of the healthcare crisis would be vastly improved had the compromise ACA never been enacted. More people would be suffering. But the absence of an existing, lame, plan would add urgency (and supporters) to the fight for a real, i.e. radical, solution.

Half a loaf is killing us.

As Joe Biden fills his cabinet with Obama-era centrists and corporatists, many Democrats say they are satisfied with the improvement over Trump: officials with government experience replacing crazies and cronies, pledges to reverse the outgoing administration’s attacks on the environment, fealty to science. They are falling into La Follette’s “half a loaf” trap. Especially on existential issues like climate change but also regarding the precarious state of the post-lockdown economy, compromise will sate the appetite for meaningful change without actually solving the problems. As with the ACA, voters will be deceived into thinking things are getting better when in fact they will still be getting worse, albeit perhaps at a slightly slower rate.

Climate scientists are divided between those who say we might be able to save human civilization if we achieve zero net carbon emissions within a decade (which is the goal of the Green New Deal pushed by progressives), and those who say it’s already too late. A widely reported study predicts that human civilization will collapse by 2050, yet that’s the year Biden is promising to begin zero net carbon emissions. So if we do what Biden wants, we are going to die.

Trump denied climate science, deregulated polluters and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord. Biden appears to be an improvement. He talks about the urgency of the problem, promises to restore Obama-era regulations and to rejoin the Paris Agreement. Pro-environment Democratic voters are breathing a sigh of relief.

But if the goal is to slow the rate of global warming as much as we reasonably can, both Obama’s regulations and the Paris Agreement are woefully inadequate. “Marginal cuts by the U.S. don’t have a long-term overall big effect on the climate,” Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, told Scientific American in 2014.

            A 2017 report by the United Nations Environment Program found that “if action to combat climate change is limited to just current pledges, the Earth will get at least 3°C (5.4°F) warmer by 2100 relative to preindustrial levels. This amount of warming would vastly exceed the Paris Agreement’s goal, which is to limit global warming by the end of the century to 2°C (3.6°F),”­ reported National Geographic.

            “[3°C increase] would bring mass extinctions and large parts of the planet would be uninhabitable,” the UNEP warned in 2019.

            If liberals head back to brunch in a month thinking that the Biden Administration will move the needle in the right direction, if they stop being terrified, we are doomed. For as bizarre as it sounds, Donald Trump provided a valuable service when he scared the living daylights out of us.

Consider a more modern analogy than the loaf of bread: if a two-pill dose of antibiotics is required to cure an illness, taking one instead doesn’t make you half better. It actually makes you worse because not only do you not get better, you destroy your immune system’s ability to fight the disease.

            This country is teetering on the verge of collapse. We can’t afford to settle for the single-pill solutions of incremental Bidenism.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

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