Two million COVID-19 cases and over 100,000 deaths in America with no end in sight argues well enough for a different approach to health care than LETZ TEH MARKETZ DOEZ ITZ!!!!! But you know what else argues well enough for a different approach? Stories of folks who survive COVID-19 and get slammed with million-dollar medical bills! Which we all knew would happen, even with "assurances" that health insurers wouldn't do it! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "cut through the red tape" and enact Medicare-for-All health insurance. Like how Social Security Works flips the script there, to tell us that private health insurance corporations are the real purveyors of "red tape"? I do enjoy having the right's memes thrown back in their faces. If your right-wing friends and neighbors persist in asserting that folks who survive COVID only to get million-dollar bills somehow get what they deserve, you may go ahead and assume that said right-wing friends and neighbors have never had to deal with a huge medical bill. I wouldn't wish such a thing on anyone! But if someone got big medical bills and then changed their perspective on the "free market" as a result, I wouldn't complain, either.
Meanwhile, our Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin -- notice how our President hasn't soured on him? That must mean he's truly evil! -- told Congress last week that our Administration wouldn't release the names of the corporations who got loans under the Paycheck Protection Program because that's "confidential" and "proprietary" information. And of course he said the exact opposite back in April when they were ramming the CARES Act down our throats! Talk about looters! Today's looters (a lot of whom are agents provocateur aiming to make protestors look bad) are pikers compared to this Administration! So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to demand that our government account for how it spent our money. Accountability: it ain't just for liberals! You may protest that "we don't know" that big corporations are using the PPP to steal money from the taxpayer (i.e., you and I!), but we're also not schmucks, and we also know that quite a few not-very-needy big corporations did get PPP money, and we also know that promising transparency and then snatching it away when you think people have forgotten your promise is a pretty good way to loot the taxpayer.
Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Interior Department to impose a moratorium on all offshore drilling leases. Of course, our Interior Department has already leased a few hundred thousand acres off the Gulf of Mexico to oil drillers -- and right in the middle of a pandemic, too, almost like that's the whole idea -- but no law of physics mandates that we can't tell them to stop. And offshore drilling is awfully unpopular these days. How do I know that? Not just because Florida's Republican elected officials tend to fight offshore drilling there, and not just because I remember the Spillageddon in the Gulf from (checks calendar, takes deep breath) over a decade ago, but also because our Administration plans to start drilling offshore in Florida after the election, which is a hell of a thing to tip us off about before the election! Did we learn this through our Administration's incompetence or through the heroism of fed-up Interior bureaucrats? We'll leave that to historians to decide. In the meantime, matters like opening up Florida's shoreline to massive pollution is a matter for us to decide, so let's make the right decision.
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