Part One:
We discuss 2020 politics with Bill Curry, who was twice the Democratic nominee for Governor of Connecticut and later a White House advisor in Bill Clinton’s administration. The Democrats must pay attention *both* to beating Donald Trump and *also* to providing us with a *policy agenda* that meets the needs of our times. It’s not enough to replace the second goal with merely a return to the status quo that existed before Trump took power.
Democrats have to be as masterful and consistent in telling the truth as the Republicans are in lying and distracting. Democrats should have done a better job of repeating our message compellingly, helping voters through the weeds until they “get” the big picture: that Trump’s presidency has been monstrously corrupt and dishonest.
We agree that the impeachment trial in the Senate will all come down to the witnesses. Curry thinks the House Dems should have subpoenaed all the witnesses, held open-door hearings, and bent over backwards to make the process transparent. Bolton, Mulvaney and Pompeo were all present in the room for many of Trump’s actions; they witnessed everything. How can a fair trial take place in the Senate without hearing from these 3 eyewitnesses?
Of course, one might justifiably worry that these former Trump allies might not testify truthfully. After all, Trump’s lawyers lied bald-facedly to the Chief Justice of the United States. Still, Curry believes that enough of the truth will come out that the juror/senators will have no choice but to see through Trump’s (weak) defense arguments and instead to recognize that he abused his powers and undermined the Constitution to the extent necessary to remove him from office.
We note that the House’s lead manager, Adam Schiff, was masterful in describing the context for Trump’s actions, including the back story about Ukraine. It will be up to each senator — and the voters who are their constituents — to decide whether to hold the president accountable.
Part Two:
We speak with Wendell Potter, the whistleblower who divulged that health insurance companies had invented and promoted the (false) mantra of “health care choice” in order to persuade the public that their health care would be better if they allowed profit-making insurance companies to allocate medical resources. Potter was the head of communications for Cigna Insurance, where he developed advertising campaigns designed to make people believe that their insurance plans actually gave them a meaningful choice in the kind of health care they received.
Potter makes it clear that the “choice” ad campaign was completely misleading. It was, in fact, the insurance companies that made the choices about which doctors to have in their networks, about which medical procedures the insurance plan would cover, and about which medications were appropriate and at what price. Of course, the insurance companies also decided how much of a deductible each plan would charge to the customer before insurance would cover health costs, how high the premiums would be for each type of medical service, and what the copays and fees would be.
After the insurance companies exercise their choices, people’s employers make their choices about which 1 or 2 or 3 insurance plans to offer to their particular employees, and what portion of the insurance premiums and deductibles the employer would pay. Only after all these choices were made would the employee/seeker-of-health-care have an opportunity to “choose” — they could choose among the few plans that one’s employer offered, and to pay the prices that the insurance company and employer had themselves negotiated and chosen.
Even more problematic, the kind of limited consumer “choice” outlined above would only apply if people were employed and if their employer chose to offer health insurance coverage at all. Similarly, if one changed jobs (voluntarily or otherwise), the consumer would confront a whole new array of “choices” from among those which its *new* employer had chosen to offer.
We ask Potter why the media, the public, and the health-care-consuming public has continued to be snookered by the insurance industry’s public relations propaganda proclaiming that they have a meaningful “choice” in the market for health insurance policies? And why don’t politicians get called out when they parrot the (false) industry-talking-points proclaiming the benefits of “choosing” one’s health insurance plan?
The answer: FUD — the insurance industry peddles fear, uncertainty and doubt. Ordinary people are understandably afraid of the unknown. What if they give up something that they know, and have it replaced (or not) with something unknown? The insurance industry PR (and the OpEds and other political campaigns that support them) are “designed to obscure truth and to get people to believe things that are not true,” and to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in people’s minds.” Potter will explore FUD and its ramifications in another article and we will discuss it with him then.
