I think there’s two main things we need
to talk about.
One is the devastatingly inept response to
the pandemic over this year.
The Trump administration has utterly failed the American people.
It has failed to take the lead.
It has failed to listen to experts.
It has failed to roll out a workable plan
to get testing in place, to steel the country,
to ensure protective supplies are rolled out.
It has failed in almost every conceivable
way to deal with a pandemic that many other
nations have brought to heel within a similar amount of time.
And more importantly, I think it has failed
to honor the sacrifices that Americans have
made in spring, when everyone obeyed social restrictions, when they stayed at home, when
they uprooted their lives at significant financial and emotional cost.
That time was meant to be used to prepare the nation for what was to come, and it was
squandered. So, that’s one aspect of it.
But I think the other that we really do need
to grapple with is that the coronavirus exploited
vulnerabilities that have been existing in
American society for decades and centuries,
well before the Trump administration.
So, the underfunding of public health, the
overpacked prisons, the understaffed nursing
homes, the health inequalities that have been brewing for all of America’s history due
to its legacy of colonialism and racism, all
of those things contributed to how bad things
are, the statistics that you read out at the
start of this segment.
And all of those vulnerabilities need to be
addressed going forward, if we are going to
be better able to deal with the pandemics
of the future.
America’s system of employer-tied insurance, which is unique in the world, is undoubtedly
contributing to the disparities that we are
seeing.
It disadvantages poor communities.
It disadvantages communities of color, Black and Latinx communities, that have been disproportionately
hit by this virus.
And we know that those disparities and this system of healthcare inequity is a legacy
of the racism that America has always struggled with.
Since the end of the Civil War, throughout
the Jim Crow era, healthcare access was pushed
away from Black communities and other communities of color.
And that goes right up to the opposition to the expansion of Medicaid and
the Affordable Care Act.
And that has led to continuing gulfs in people being able to access healthcare, that is contributing
to the disproportionate toll that this virus
has taken upon communities of color.
Even before the pandemic started, America was rated by some global indices as being
the most prepared nation in the world.
That seems a bit ludicrous in hindsight.
But even then, in terms of healthcare access, America was rated as 175th out of 195 different
countries.
This was always known to be a massive vulnerability that would cost the country dearly during
a crisis of this kind.
And, sure enough, it has, in a very preventable, very tragic way.
And this has to be addressed.
If this can’t — if we can’t use the
lessons from this pandemic to realize that
universal healthcare is a thing we have to
fight for, I don’t know whether — I don’t
know whether we’re going to do any better,
not just for the future phases of this pandemic,
but for future pandemics to come
and all the other health problems that we still need to deal with.
