Dear Mr. President: Hi. How’ve you been? I know you’re busy, but I had an idea I wanted to run by you, and I figured the best way to get in touch would be an op-ed column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette – I imagine you start each day by reading this, the true paper of record, as you sip your café olé, digging into caviar or seared baby seal meat or whatever people as rich as you eat.
Here’s the pitch: Forget the $5,000 payout — offer folks Medicare for All. I know, I know. I can hear you dismissing the idea — woke, radical left, socialist, blah, blah, blah. But hear me out. I’d like to present an argument that you might have missed.
First, I want you to picture me — radical left, woke communist (i.e., middle-of-the-road Democrat) living in western Massachusetts. The kind of guy that eats tofu for dinner and acknowledges people’s pronoun preferences. Is your blood boiling yet?
Now picture me going in for a colonoscopy — you probably like to hear that — a nice humiliating procedure, right? I get to the front desk, and they ask for my Trump-care card.
That’s right, because you can name it that! You don’t have to call it Medicare for All! You can name it Trumpy Trumpington’s Donald Care, if you like. Hell, put your picture on the cards! And all us liberals will have to hold our noses and hand that card over every time we go to the doctor.
See, I didn’t think appealing to your humanity would work, as you seem pretty dismissive of such namby-pamby feelings like the well-being of your fellow Americans. And I didn’t think logic would work, so I saw no need to quote studies that show that a single-payer health care system would in the end save money.
But c’mon, Donald… doesn’t the pettiness appeal to you?
Force Bernie to have to vote for you. What’s he going to do, vote against it?
Force me and my ilk to have to say things like, “Just a minute, I can’t find my Trumpcare number,” and pull that card out of our wallet with your face smirking at us.
And of course, if I’m to believe the articles that social media’s algorithms love to throw at me on the topic, if you do this, to quote professor Peter Venkman, Ph.D., “you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.”
Just think about it.
Michael Salop lives in Easthampton.