 So I know a lot of people may have forgotten about this, but we are still currently living through a pandemic. COVID-19 is still very much an issue. And we have now passed two million Americans who are infected with COVID-19, and we're about to reach 120,000 deaths in America due to COVID-19. So this is a very, very serious issue still, contrary to popular belief. And the reason why I want to talk about this story is because it really speaks to how broken our healthcare system is, because if you are lucky enough to survive COVID-19 after being unfortunate enough to get it, you may be hit with thousands and thousands, if not more than a million dollars worth of medical bills. Yeah. So there's a couple of stories I want to share with you. The first is from Madeline Carlisle and Tara Law of Time, who explained, after spending months hospitalized for COVID-19 at Swedish Medical Center in Issaquah, Washington, Michael Floor 70 says that he knew his stay would be pricey. He'd spent 62 days in an intensive care unit, including weeks in an induced coma and come so close to death that his family had called to say goodbye. But he says it was still hard stopping to read the hospital's bill for $1.1 million. I had to look at it a number of times to see if I was seeing it right. Floor, a Seattle resident, tells Time. The 181-page bill included almost 3,000 itemized charges the Seattle Times reported. His room in the intensive care unit alone had cost about $9,700 a day, Floor says. Floor says the total cost of his treatment will likely be higher because the bill does not include multiple items, including fees for his skilled nursing facility, dialysis, and the doctors who treated him. Floor says he may not ultimately need to pay for much of his treatment. He's insured by Medicare and Medicare Advantage through Kaiser Permanente. The health care company has announced that it will waive most out-of-pocket costs for COVID-19 patients through 2020. So this Seattle man almost died from COVID-19. In fact, he thought that his death was a certainty, so much so that his family had said their goodbyes. So this should be a time of celebration, but instead, he's being hit with more than a million dollars and likely more in medical bills. And he is hopeful that, you know, a lot of this will be waived or covered by his health care provider, but I mean, that's not a guarantee. There's still that uncertainty. There's still that worry when, again, he should be celebrating. He gets to live longer. He was not killed by COVID-19, but he's not alone. I've got another one for you. As Joseph Goldstein of the New York Times reports, Janet Mendez started receiving bills soon after returning in April to her mother's home from Mount Senai Morningside Hospital, where she nearly died of COVID-19. First, there was one for $31,165. Unable to work and finding it difficult to walk, Ms. Mendez decided to put the bill out of her mind and focus on her recovery. The next one was impossible to ignore. An invoice for $401,885.57, although it noted that the hospital would reduce the bill by $326,851.63 as financial assistance benefit. But that still left a tab of more than $75,000. Oh my God, how am I going to pay all this money? Ms. Mendez, 33, recalled thinking. The answer came to her in about a second. I'm not going to be able to pay all this. Ms. Mendez is optimistic that her insurance company will cover a large part of the costs, but only after receiving a series of harassing phone calls from the hospital about payment. A spokesman for the hospital told the Times that Ms. Mendez erroneously received a bill that should have gone directly to her insurance company or the government. Coronavirus patients through a series of federal aid packages are supposed to be largely exempt from paying for the bulk of their care. But mistakes are likely to occur, particularly given the number of people who have recently lost their health insurance amid an economic downturn and widespread job loss. And when they do happen, patients like Ms. Mendez will be the ones to have to sort out the complicated billing process at a time when they are still recovering from COVID-19. Now, you may hear these stories and think, but Mike, isn't this kind of not that big of a deal? If these all end with a happy ending? If these patients who got these bills are confident that their healthcare providers are going to pay for this? Well, no, because this is not something that people should be worrying about. The United States is the only developed world where you don't just have to worry about dying from COVID-19. You have to worry about drowning in medical debt if you are lucky enough to survive. And this really is a feature of our broken system. Because as Business Insiders Kimberly Leonard reports, Kristen link young a fellow at the USC Brookings Schaefer Initiative for Health Policy said part of the reason patients are still getting large medical bills is that healthcare providers are dealing with a whole bunch of new payment options. On top of that, she said there are loopholes in the new laws and regulations. It's going to result in a significant amount of confusion on the consumer. And she said adding that people's fear of bills could deter them from seeking care. So that kind of speaks to a different issue there in that last paragraph. I mean, the fact that people are worried about out of pocket costs makes us less capable of dealing with with COVID-19. Because if you are afraid of a medical bill and therefore you don't get tested, then I mean, that's going to proliferate the spread of the virus. So our system is so fundamentally broken. I can't even express how bad it is, right? The fact that there's all this confusion and hospitals have to send the bill somewhere. So they got to find out where to send it to. But the problem is that we've kind of relied on employers for healthcare. In fact, during the Democratic primary, remember when that was a thing, people like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg said that people love their employer based health insurance. Guess what? During a pandemic and a possible depression, when people are losing their jobs and also their health insurance as a result, well, you know, now there's confusion because they have new healthcare providers that the hospitals don't know about. It just creates a headache when if there was just one insurer, the United States government, then guess what? It's simple. You always know where to send the bill to the US government, Medicare. So any politician during a pandemic that does not support Medicare for all is a piece of shit. I cannot emphasize this enough. And yes, that includes Joe Biden, who is the Democratic Party nominee. He is a piece of shit if he doesn't support Medicare for all. And I know that that really is difficult for liberals to hear. But you've got to understand, you know, it is one thing to not be in favor of any fixes as Republicans are. They just don't care that people are dying. But if you don't actually want to apply the correct solution, that's easy. That makes sense. Then you're just the piece of shit. I don't know how us to put this. It can't be said any nicer. Anyone who's against Medicare for all before I view them as a moral. But now if you're still against Medicare for all during a pandemic, I view you as insane. You are insane. If you don't think that this solution isn't just the more moral solution, right, the more compassionate fix to our health care woes. But it's also easier. Hospitals don't want to deal with the paperwork, right? We don't need this unnecessary private bureaucracy slowing down the process. Everything will function more properly if we adopt a single payer system like Canada. But guess what? As I get more impatient, my demands kind of go up, right? Because maybe having a single payer health insurer isn't necessarily the best like a socialized health insurance plan might not be sufficient for me. Maybe we should start talking about a real socialized health care system as Republicans say we want, where we have publicly funded hospitals and doctors are on the government payroll. I mean, that's what the UK has with the NHS. So I mean, the system is broken. And the fact that Medicare for all isn't seen as the compromise between a private system and a UK type NHS system is absurd. We have politicians running for office right now during a pandemic who don't support Medicare for all. That is so insane that we can't just say, Oh, well, you're a moral. These people are okay with people getting these medical bills if they survive and worse yet, dying if they don't seek treatment, right? Because before this pandemic, 68,000 Americans were dying every single year according to a Princeton study because they didn't have health care. So now if we allow this to continue, let people just not go to the doctor if they're feeling sick because they don't want to deal with the costs or let them go to the doctor and then get these big bills. It's a moral. It's disgusting. And it's antithetical to what we say we are as the United States. So I mean, I've said everything that I needed to say about this. If you don't support Medicare for all in 2020, you are a piece of shit. And I have zero respect for you.