President Trump’s refusal to take responsibility for either the more than 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus or the cost of his special medical treatment after testing positive for the virus highlights everything wrong with health care in America.
The New York Times estimated that Trump’s three-day stint in the hospital would have cost the average American more than $100,000, not to mention “significant surprise bills and medical debt even after the health insurance paid its share.”
With America’s for-profit health care system, about 44 million people have no health insurance, and another 38 million have inadequate health insurance. This means nearly one-third of Americans don’t know if they’ll have medical care when they need it, such as when they get Covid.
(And Trump has been criticized for undermining the efforts to fight the virus. Cristina Hops, a nurse based in Seattle, said, “How dare he [Trump] undermine all of the work that we have done as nurses and health care providers?” She works on the frontlines helping patients battling the coronavirus, spending five weeks this summer in Miami to help a hospital cope with its flood of cases. Hops was horrified after reading a now-infamous tweet that President Donald Trump issued after he left the hospital. Trump told Americans: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” Hops posted a video expressing her outrage. Within days, it garnered more than 300,000 views on Tik Tok.)
“For Trump, ‘socialized medicine’ is bad for everyone but himself.”
Those were the words of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on October 7. The Vermont Senator pointed out that the excellent care Trump received at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was in “a 100 percent government-funded, government-run hospital.”
If Donald Trump is guaranteed quality health care free of charge, why aren’t the essential workers who clean the White House entitled to free health? Why aren’t all of us?
