May 28
GUEST: Dr. Oliver Fein, Professor of Clinical Medicine and Public Health at the Weill Cornell Medical College and Chair of the Board of the NY Metro Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, talks about how COVID has changed the national healthcare debate.PNHP NY Metro Chapter
There is a common thread to our twin disasters of racism and COVID. The state has failed to protect its citizens, or at least the 99% of them. The rich elite got a great deal of the stimulus money, as we knew they would. Our doctors went without protective clothing and masks. Our nursing homes became extermination centers due to lack of testing and substandard conditions.
And as always, Blacks are paying a much higher price. The state keeps itself in power by using racism to divide us. Trump and the Republican Party are just continuing the last hundred years of Jim Crow oppression, and it is tearing the country apart. The Democratic Party isn't much better. They are all talk while they get fat on the corporate gravy train. Look at our own Rep. Delgado. With ties to Wall Street corporations, he has resisted calls for a Green New Deal, for universal healthcare, and for a foreign policy based on respect for human rights. His "foreign policy" aide is an apologist for Israel, who interned for an Israeli funded propaganda organization in the West Bank.
People like Dr. Fein, of course, are on the front lines in advocating for a fair and affordable healthcare program for everyone. The same program that every other developed country in the world already has. And the only reason we can't have healthcare for all is because the big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street buy up our politicians like Rep. Delgado and Governor Cuomo to make sure their obscene profits keep rolling in.
Sometimes there is the heady feeling that we could throw all the bums out. That we could join together and march from city to city and from state to state, demanding that the corporations take their knee off our necks, and let us breath. We could then put an end to racism and corporatism and embrace our multicolored future.
