The Inequaity of Treatment

Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times, describes how the allocation of treatment during the COVID pandemic is revealing the levels of corruption present in our health care system.

Some of these men received their treatments before they were available to the public. Giuliani may have got his instead of a member of the public. His case sheds light on two kinds of corruption. There’s the corruption of an administration that appears to be using government power to procure potentially lifesaving favors for the president’s friends. And there’s the corruption of a for-profit medical system in which V.I.P. patients can receive extraordinary levels of care, sometimes at the expense of the less connected.

Link

How We Got Here

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo really “hits the nail on the head”

None of this had to happen. It is a failure of cataclysmic proportions. It has many roots. It has revealed many insufficiencies and failures in our society and institutions. But the scale of it, the unifying force of it is a man who never should have been president, who has abandoned his responsibility to lead and protect the country, making it every state for itself, a chaos only organized by a shiftless and shambling effort to help himself at all costs at every point.