Hollywood Spinners

Prepare for a diatribe: I’ve about had enough of Hollywood. My malaise started not long ago with the tiresome Elizabeth Banks’ vacuous diatribe about her disappointment in the 53% of white women who voted for Donald Trump instead of Kamala Harris. Her criticism of the Trump Administration is of course based on her astounding lack of foreign policy acumen and a world view from inside the bubble of privilege.  After all, she is a white woman from Massachusetts, campaigned for Hillary and Kamala, and attended the University of Pennsylvania where she graduated with honors.  Ahem, as a Communications major.  So, obviously she must know what’s best for you.  And she did appear in a Kia commercial.  You may recall, Liz is a member of the second-tier character actor club, best known for her portrayal of Effie in the Hunger Games franchise where her make-up and wardrobe budget alone exceeded the GDP of most third world nations.  Of course, she used her Effie character as a springboard to suggest that the afore mentioned white women should be “revolutionary” like Effie, who rose from a government automaton to join the resistance to fight fascism.  And there it is. Ironic that in the same manner as another Hunger Games alum, the late progressive Donald Sutherland, she interprets the series theme as a rebuke of a fascist regime, naturally drawing a comparison, as misplaced as it may be, to the Trump Administration. Upon analysis of the literature such as it is, the franchise theme appears to be more applicable as a critique of socialism, ever expanding government control and democrat policy where the elite are government officials and the populace serves their masters in the Capitol.  Far be it for me to suggest I’m some sort of an expert on interpreting adolescent film drama, but seriously this should be pretty obvious even to a Communications Major.  

 But even more alarming is the HBO series The Pitt, a reasonably accurate medical drama about an emergency department in a Pittsburgh hospital.  Their subject matter has become progressively and disproportionately woke with a diverse cast. And by diverse, I mean checks all the boxes: White, Black, male, female, Hispanic, Filipino, Muslim, Indian, LGBTQ, disabled, autistic, check, check, check and check. Not that diversity in this case is an issue and it likely may actually reflect an inner-city hospital staff but, wow, it’s like they actually had a checklist.  And what makes that so amusing is that after the second season, like any large cast television series, some cast members were either written out or chose to move on, again as would tend to happen in a teaching hospital, but in this case two of the cast members were “persons of color.”  Uh-oh. Cue the outrage as perhaps the most woke series on television is being criticized for being racist.  Hilarious. Two cast members recently gushed on Instagram that they had their “Obama moment” when they met one of his daughters. Seriously these people need to get a life. Outside the liberal bubble.

 But I digress.  The cast of doctors are painted with a broad dramatic brush.  They are a compassionate, super-dedicated, selfless, self-righteous lot, possessing encyclopedic knowledge in all facets of medicine even beyond their specialties.  Seen a physician lately? If only life reflected art. But in one particularly offen episodes they introduce ICE officers into the ED, and they’re typecast exactly as the leftist media portrays them: imposing, armed, masked, jackbooted thugs brutalizing a poor helpless Hispanic woman.  The busy holiday weekend waiting room immediately empties out and some of the hospital staff vanishes, implying that the majority of the hospital ED patients and some of the hospital employees are illegal immigrants.  This of course is intolerable to the super-human righteous and indignant doctors and nurses, and one male nurse who intervenes is brought to the ground, cuffed and arrested for obstruction.  Oh, the horror. But wait a minute. The left leaning writers in their haste, also weave into the story references to another local hospital having to close their emergency departmentdue to lack of funds, thus contributing to The Pitt’s overcrowded conditions.  Another parallel storyline features a friend of the ED chief who ends up waiting hours for a CT scan despite having the chief in his corner.  Yet another storyline follows an ED resident’s extracurricular passion using hospital supplies to treat the homeless, or “unhoused substance abusers” in Pittspeak, outside the hospital.  So, once you get beyond the immediate and intended sympathetic response to the plight of the less fortunate, the next question that should pass through the mind of the thoughtful viewer is: who exactly is paying for all these services? Well, you are! A hospital is, after all is said and done, a business.  Hospitals receive government grants to treat those who cannot afford care and are enrolled in a government healthcare program through yet another government program called “disproportionate share hospital” (DSH) payments. And these government grants come from taxpayers. Similarly, Medicaid recipients, the government sponsored medical program for the poor, receive “free” healthcare.  But that too is paid for with taxpayer funds. And the remaining shortfall, and a shortfall it will be with the draconian reimbursement schedule Medicaid imposes on participating healthcare providers, must be absorbed by the hospital whose remaining revenue comes from private pay patients and those who are privately insured. But even insurance reimbursements are a fraction of what is actually charged for services, although that charge is artificially inflated to compensate for the reduced reimbursement and to help pay for those who cannot afford treatment.  If you were wondering why your insurance premiums are so high, there you have it.  You, my friend, are subsidizing the insurance coverage of the less fortunate and your inflated payments are subsidizing the hospital’s ability to treat those who cannot pay at all.Thank you, Obamacare. For those that abhor the thought of socialized medicine, I have news for you: medicine in this country is already one big, socialized redistribution of wealth.

So, one affront at a time please:  

ICE agents in the ED? They are law enforcement officers doing the job they were hired to do.  In this case removing illegal aliens from this country let in by the Biden Administration cynically hoping that one day they will attain citizenship through some democrat sponsored amnesty program after which there is an 85% chance they will vote democrat. Sure, this woman may be providing service as a domestic, a farm laborer, doing a job Americans are too lazy to do.  But she is artificially suppressing the wage for American workers and statistically, although she may be working, she is likely using government services far in excess of what she contributes.  And although this first wave of immigrants is likely to seek work, it has been shown that their children are more likely to be dependent on government services. And the male nurse that intervened in an apprehension?  Since when do citizens obstruct law enforcement officers from applying the law? Whether or not you think the law is fair, you do not lay hands on a law enforcement officer.  See how that works out for you.  Wasn’t it the democrats who were preaching “no one is above the law.” Only the laws they agree with and when they’re applied to the opposition, apparently.  Hypocrites. And why exactly do you suspect the other emergency department was forced to close?  Could it be that they were flooded with patients who can’t pay for their services? Or perhaps they reached that tipping point where the percentage of Medicaid and indigent patients far exceeded the numbers of private pay patients and those with insurance who actually keep the lights on.  And what happens when all those indigent, uninsured patients descend on The Pitt? Or perhaps next season they can preach the “Medicare for all” narrative and put a spin on that.  Medicare reimburses on the same schedule as Medicaid and if all the hospitals are subjected to that fee schedule, the rural community hospitals will close first followed by the underperforming hospitals, followed by the larger institutions when they too are overrun. The lesser educated and higher risk patients will continue to use the ED as their primary care physician, only this time those numbers will increase astronomically when everyone has access to government sponsored care.  Wait times will increase, resources will be rationed, physicians will retire in droves when renumeration falls precipitously, medicine will cease to be a chosen profession of the best and brightest, hospital facilities will decay, outcomes will suffer. Our healthcare system, the envy of the world, will deteriorate into the second rate services offered by Canada, England, and most of Europe.  Canada was once held up as a beacon of healthcare excellence, having the gall to suggest that they had superior outcomes to the US in treating cancer.  In-depth analysis found that most advanced cases weren’t included in the analysis because they died waiting for care, whereas the US was treating the difficult cases that dragged down their survival rates.  And now Canada has MAID, medically assisted suicide, where patients with a poor prognosis are given the option to end their lives rather than be subjected to the crap shoot of government run healthcare. In some cases it has been claimed that patients have been coerced into ending their lives by the government representatives, most likely because it is a cheaper option than treating them. For perspective, there were 11721 reported murders in the United States in 2025 in a country of 340 million people.  In Canada in 2024 there were 16499 deaths by medically assisted suicide accounting for 5.1% of all deaths in a country….with a population of just over 41 million.  Let me repeat that: in 2025 more people were killed by Canada’s national health system than were murdered in the United States.  Is this the utopian healthcare model we are being promised?  Does anyone think that our elected officials will be participating in the program? Of course not. Their thinking: Let them eat cake.  In the end, socialized medicine is the same scam that all socialist programs are: redistribution of wealth to pay for an “equitable” program or product that provides lesser quality services for all…..except the elites that are pulling the levers of government.  So, in summary, the Pitt has managed to do a credible job of portraying the nuts and bolts of medical practice in the ED, but they really need to be schooled on the realities of socialized medicine and the ramifications of their woke agenda.