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Part One:
Trump’s War on Whistleblowers. Our guest is Mel Goodman, professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. A former CIA whistleblower himself, Goodman explains how the whistleblower system is supposed to work: with full protection for a public servant who sees something wrong and calls it to the attention of people who can fix the problem. Goodman distinguishes this from what happened recently, where President Trump and his cronies have instead attacked the whistleblower and stonewalled any legitimate investigation into his own wrongdoing.
Goodman sees this as part of a broader practice whereby Trump demeans and intimidates all kinds of law enforcement agents who are trying to do their jobs: investigating and preventing the president from using his official powers to serve his own personal interests, while undermining the well-being of the United States. Whether it’s the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, U.S. Attorney’s Office, or agency Inspectors General, if they’re unwilling to falsely exonerate Trump from any and all accusations of wrongdoing, he demonizes them, accuses them of conspiring to peddle “fake news” or “hoaxes,” and calls them liars, traitors, or worse.
Neither Congress nor the American people should tolerate Trump’s Alice-in-Wonderland worldview. We must appreciate that our democracy depends on good people (like whistleblowers) pointing out attempts to undermine national interests, and, likewise, that people who try to paint these patriots as villains are merely trying to protect their own malfeasance.
Part Two:
The Fetishization of Employer-Provided Health Care. We speak with Libby Watson, reporter for the New Republic, about people’s false belief that the health insurance they receive from their employers is a good deal worth fighting to keep. Unlike the situation in past generations, average working people can’t depend on keeping their jobs for their entire lives. So their health insurance plans are just as much at-risk as their wages are. More importantly, even when their employer pays the majority of people’s health insurance premiums, the average American can’t afford to pay even their own share of their health insurance premiums (not to mention huge deductibles, copays, etc.). Why do we refuse to give up these insurance plans when we’re not even being protected by them?
Watson explains why Britain’s national health care system — which doesn’t rely on insurance companies to dictate what care people get or who provides that care — is so different from the American system (and so much better for patients and their health outcomes). She can’t understand why so many politicians, even Democrats, are so brainwashed that they’re blind to the advantages of a single-payer health care system for anyone who’s not rich. And blind to the disadvantages of a system run by profit-motivated insurance companies, where “class warfare is a pre-existing condition.”
