With the heavy and repeated use of the word “but,” Friday’s CBS Mornings and CBS Mornings Plus sought to emphasize with, normalize, and explain away the disgusting and widespread celebrations of the far-left on social media celebrating the murder of the UnitedHealthCare’s CEO and wondered if this assassination would lead to “something good” like socialized medicine.
CBS also never attached a party label to those scoffing at the need to feel sympathy for Brian Thompson’s children, wife, and loved ones as far-left, progressive, or even liberal.
In addition to not even calling this behavior extreme, CBS didn’t cite the role the dangerously unstable and former guest Taylor Lorenz has played in fomenting these claims. Even NBC’s Ken Dilanian called her out.
CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King teased a segment on “why so many people online are saying they hate their insurance company” after implicitly connecting the murder with a reversal by Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield about anesthesia coverage.
King later seemed shock as she began the segment, claiming “some of us have been really surprised by the action — the reaction, rather, online,” describing said reactions as voicing “very deep frustration with the health insurance industry.”
This 'CBS Mornings' segment touting those celebrating the murder of the United HealthCare CEO is insane. Nowhere do they mention these are leftists doing this, so no ideological ID. They insist this is wrong, but spend most of the time justifying their "anger" pic.twitter.com/5ciYiS0CgM
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 6, 2024
After five different TikTok users showing approval with the murder, King merely said the last celebrator spoke “for a lot of people there, this really isn’t about this tragedy” but really health care costs.
She then brought in CBS News contributor Dr. Celine Gounder to explain “why so many people are so very angry” and started with the declaration that “we can all agree that the system is broken..but it seems that people are having hard times separating the broken system from the person.”
“The fact that so many people are gleeful is the word, that this has happened to this man, just sort of stuns me. How did we get here,” King asked.
Gounder laid down a brief marker that “vigilante justice is not okay” and “[w]e do have a country of law and order where there are systems to address these issues.”
After an unfortunate mix-up of Al Sharpton and Jimmy McMillan, she conceded “we’ve gotten to a point where health care is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations about the system.”
Gounder and featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers then spent the next few minutes making the case for European-style socialized medicine and also touting both ObamaCare and Joe Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (click “expand”):
GOUNDER: [U]nder President Obama, there was the Affordable Care Act which helped to expand health insurance, so you had Medicaid, you had the marketplace, then you also have subsidies to make it more affordable to purchase plans on the marketplace. Those are made even more generous during the pandemic and then those more generous subsidies were extended under the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden, but we also have other challenges in terms of why are health care costs rising. So you know, you have efforts to extend coverage and — and make more people have health care be available, but prices are going up.
DUTHIERS: So this is — we’re the only country in the developed world that has this struggle, that has this challenge of people seeing the cost of health care getting — rising and insurance premiums also rising. There’s a recent KFF poll that found a quarter of U.S. adults say they’ve skipped or postponed getting the care they need simply because of the cost, so what needs to change?
GOUNDER: Well, we have a very different health care system from other countries. We have a very — piecemeal health care system with our coverage, with the way it’s delivered. Many other countries have what we call socialized medicine. By the way, Medicare is socialized medicine.
KING: Yeah.
GOUNDER: And even that socialized medicine is the most expensive in terms of health care for the elderly in the world. There are a lot of different proposals that have been made. So again, going back to the Inflation Reduction Act, negotiating down the price of drugs, giving Medicare the authority to do that. We’ve already seen one round of price negotiations. The incoming administration wants to eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act, at least many of the provisions of that, so whether that will continue we don’t know. We’ve seen a lot of mergers andacquisitions in the health care industry, which means less competition. The Biden administration has been trying to pursue antitrust suits to block some of these. The Trump administration, the prior administration, tried to make drug prices — or — excuse me, health care pricing more transparent. That was another way of trying to make things better.
A few minutes alter, King made the odious claim that perhaps “something good could come out of this tragedy” with “insurance companies” deciding “we can and we need to do better.”
She predictably made that suggestion with the lame qualifier that she “hate[s]” to say that.”
In the show’s third hour, Duthiers framed the situation as the “murder...touched a nerve” by giving Americans an outlet “to say how upset they are with their health insurance.”
Co-host Adriana Diaz said “we still don't know why the United HealthCare CEO, Brian Thompson was murdered,” but what we have seen is “surpris[ing]” “reactions on social media” that have “saddened us.”
“Yes, some of it has been mean and thoughtless, some of it seems to be born out of a very real bitterness toward the overall health insurance industry,” she added as she made the pivot from denunciation to validation of the ghoulishness of those “speaking their stories” about struggles with the health care industry.
With Diaz and Duthiers providing a similar setup, Gounder resurfaced to pull on a thread Duthiers started about the difference between medical accessibility, advancements, costs, and quality of care (click “expand”):
DUTHIERS:. So, Celine, healthcare has arguably become more accessible in this country. The leaps and bounds we have made in medical care for people in this country has grown exponentially over the last couple of years and yet it is more expensive, and people can't afford it. People are delaying getting treatment for some of the things that are sometimes life-threatening, because they can't afford it. What is going on?
GOUNDER: I think sometimes in this country we confuse having the highest technical advancements, biomedical advancements, having that level of care with having good healthcare for everybody and so, we may be making giant leaps and bounds in terms of the science. The research, that is very different from people actually having access to the benefits of that. There are a number of things driving costs. I’m not going to be able to list any of them now, but many will be familiar to many people. One is the increasing cost of prescription drugs and there are specific drugs that are really driving one. This one group of them has been in the news a lot lately, the GLP-1 weight loss drugs and we’re talking about —
DIAZ: The Ozempics and —
GOUNDER: — the Ozempics, Zepbound, Mounjaro, etc., but those are not the only ones. These are specialty drugs that drive a lot of the prescription drug spending. You also have mergers and acquisitions with healthcare systems, so you have decreased competition, that drives prices up, you have staffing shortages where, just to get nurses to work in a health facility, health systems are having to pay more and more. And then, because our system is so fragmented, so complicated, the administrative cost that we have in this country are far higher than what you see with other healthcare systems in other countries.
DIAZ: And we have all been there, you know, the phone with the insurance company trying to get coverage. I mean, it’s — it’s something that touches everyone —
DUTHIERS: That’s right.
DIAZ: — and 70 percent of folks, according to KFF who filed claims under the ACA, which is supposed to provide more access, they were denied.
Later, Duthiers concluded with, yes, another plea for socialized medicine as the former lamented it’s “terrible” and “horrible” those “so angry” about healthcare are “almost gleeful” about the murder yet wondered if people aren’t noticing the role of “money in campaign financing” and “lobbying” that’s thwarted supposed “changes.”
To see the relevant transcripts from December 6, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).
