It has to be a scurrilous lie. Seriously: nobody is that evil.
Although it is the sort of thing that we've come to expect because our unique-in-the-world, for-profit health insurance system leaves Americans financially vulnerable to sickness but offers huge profits to companies and CEOs in the system.
Some cynical people are suggesting that the reason Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is forcing teachers and children to sit for hours every day in classrooms with unmasked children is because he wants them all to get infected with Covid"to make money for a friend of his.
Seriously. There's that theory out there, and it's almost too evil to believe it could be true.
That DeSantis is intentionally trying to expose children, families and public-school teachers to a deadly disease simply because it'll make a few million extra dollars for his largest donor, billionaire Ken Griffin, whose fund is one of the biggest stockholders in the company that makes the only available monoclonal antibody drug approved to treat Covid.
And, of course, it might also take out a few hundred unionized teachers, a bonus in any Republican's book.
But it can't be true that DeSantis is spreading disease just to goose healthcare profits, can it?
After all, when the federal government offered to give Florida billions of dollars to expand their Medicaid program to provide free healthcare for the state's working poor, Governor Rick Scott and later Governor DeSantis said a firm "no."
Even though all that money coming into the state to pay for healthcare could have goosed up the profits of any number of hospitals and health operations Griffin could invest in, DeSantis still refused to expand Medicaid statewide. (He did eventually sign an expansion of Medicaid for new moms, but it's a pittance and arguably a shout-out to the forced-birth crowd.)
Far more likely is that DeSantis just wants to win the Republican primary for president in 2024 and thinks having the Trump "base" and Fox "News" on his side will get him there.
After all, having hundreds of thousands of Floridians suffer disability or die - bankrupting family after family - just to score points with Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson demonstrates all the manly cred he'll need. Right?
It's another danger of having a for-profit health insurance system that doesn't cover everybody, so when a corrupt governor like DeSantis uses death and disease for political manipulation families end up ill, broke and desperate - as are millions of American families right now because of Covid.
Whatever's going on with DeSantis, we're not Brazil and we really do need to get past behaving like a third-world country where the boss-man plays games with deadly diseases for political gain.
And the best way to do that is to finally join pretty much every other developed country in the world and put into place a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare For All.
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