Jimmy Kimmel’s Response to Senator Cassidy
October 27, 2017
Jimmy Kimmel has said that Senator Bill Cassidy “lied to his face” when discussing the topic of healthcare. In May, the Senator was invited onto Jimmy Kimmel Live! and they talked about the issue of healthcare today. Kimmel spoke openly about his son’s heart problem and the open heart surgeries he had to go through. He mentioned wanting healthcare to become available to all regardless of financial standing. Cassidy said that his new bill(which is also in partnership with senators, Lindsey O. Graham, Dean Heller, and Ron Johnson) “Passes the Jimmy Kimmel test”. Kimmel was unpleasantly surprised when it was revealed that Cassidy’s bill did the complete opposite to what was really discussed. To pass the “Jimmy Kimmel Test” it must include that, “No family should be denied medical care, emergency, or otherwise, because they can’t afford it,” Kimmel tweeted. He also stated that when Cassidy was on his show, he said in his new bill he wanted to include coverage for everyone, no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, lower premiums for middle-class families, and no lifetime caps. Instead the proposed bill includes that instead of putting money towards Medicaid and subsidies it would be put into a block grant that allows the state to make whatever healthcare they’d like. This bill would also eliminate the employer mandate, so this would mean that instead of having the bigger companies offer affordable health insurance for their employees, it’d just be eliminated.
The comedian and talk show host has been receiving backlash for “getting too involved in politics.” It has been believed that comedians should stick to comedy and nothing else. I disagree because being a comedian doesn’t just mean that their purpose is making people laugh. There is still room for them to voice their opinions. Sometimes we need to be reminded of our problems instead of pushing them back. With such a large platform, I believe he had all the right to speak about the issue concerning millions of Americans who can’t afford or who do not have healthcare. “They’re counting on you to be so overwhelmed with all the information, you just trust them to take care of you. But they’re not taking care of you,” Kimmel said, addressing the millions of people who tuned in that day. To me this means that people are expected to just ignore this information that they can’t wrap their head around and wait for other people to just assume what they need. People shouldn’t be expected to ignore information they don’t understand and wait for someone else to explain it to them.
“Most of the congress people who vote on this bill probably won’t even read it. And they want us to do the same thing. They want us to treat it like an iTunes service agreement.” I could not agree more with this statement that Kimmel said. I too am guilty of quickly skimming or not even reading any sort of “service agreement.” I just quickly press the agree button, to get it over with, and go back to what I was doing. But passing a healthcare bill is different from just agreeing to a service agreement. Congress wants to pass off the healthcare bill as something that is not worthy of their time or attention. They don’t notice that millions of people everywhere are suffering due to not having healthcare and can’t pay for their own children, parents, or friends to have the adequate care that they deserve.
https://www.cigna.com/assets/docs/about-cigna/…on…/employer-mandate-fact-sheet.pdf
