I was listening to a Youtube video about Trump. It was just one guy - a lawyer doing a “walk and talk” so he mentioned some personal stuff. He talked about his wife getting a double lung transplant. He’s rich so he has great insurance and - of course - he doesn’t and didn’t have to worry about what many people do: all sorts of costs connected to the transplant and the myriad costs that follow on and on. I was curious what the transplant costs. I did some googling and the answer seems to be…

The average cost of a double-lung transplant is $1.3 million before insurance.

In his Youtube video it was hard to piece together info about the transplant because he assumes that at Youtube his intended Twitter audience already knows about her and about it. But it seemed she got it a few years ago. I checked his Twitter account going back a few years to see if he’s tweeted about stuff like universal healthcare. He didn’t seem to. He noted healthcare problems and inequities but that’s about it. Here’s an example tweet from mid 2020.

If Medicare and Tricare work, why not for everyone. A: the pressure by business interests. why tie health care to employment? so that employers have a stable work force - no matter what’s best for the employee.

Basically - his attitude could be described in a word much-loved by liberals and neoliberals: the modal verb “should”. My favorite dictionary has a definition about should: “indicating a desirable or expected state”. “Should” points something out but the idea of doing anything about it is conveniently missing. He was a Hillary supporter for 2016 and a Biden supporter for 2020.

“Why not healthcare for everyone?” Look who you support, buddy. In this context “should” is utterly pointless.

I guess there’s nothing that could make him actually support a m4a candidate. He’s not an idiot. He knows the reality of a double lung transplant. A huge percentage of people would either watch their spouce die or as a couple they’d go into a horrible spiral of medical bankruptcy. In the video he speaks about “Trump’s inevitable defeat”. He’s a smart guy but a fool. He’s such a lib archtype.

I like giving sources even if hardly anyone (maybe no one) will click the link. He’s an MSNBC legal analyist: John P. Flannery (@JonFlan).