Full transparency here, I only watched the first 30 minutes of the Democratic debate last night.

I turned it off after Pete berated Elizabeth Warren for refusing to answer a question about funding Medicare with a yes or a no.

I turned off the “debate” and decided to have a dance party with my children in the kitchen in which each of us got to choose one song. For the record, Chicken chose “We Are the Champions.” Buster went with “Galway Girl,” and I picked… wait for it… Meat Loaf’s 1993 classic rock opera ballad “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That.)” It was a weird dance party but I worked some shit out.

OK look, Mayor Pete. I get why you executed the “If you can’t answer yes or no, then you’re trying to put one over on us” play. Everyone wants answers to be simple and you can score easy points off a woman who’s already taking deep breaths to ignore ankle biters with the criticism that she’s “too professorial!”

However, and I hear you’re a smart cookie so you should probably already know this in at least four languages, the reality is that government funding of health care has precious few questions that can be answered with a straight yes or no (or, if you prefer Norwegian, ja og nei.)

This shit is COMPLICATED. Asking Elizabeth Warren to give a yes or no answer about FUNDING HEALTH CARE is like asking me to give a straight up or down answer on the epic yet possibly a little TOO epic Meat Loaf rock opera ballad “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That.)”

I mean, it’s BOTH. It’s BOTH ALL THE WAY. It’s ONE HUNDRED PERCENT GLORIOUS MUSICAL CATHARSIS and also TWELVE MINUTES LONG and DID MICHAEL BAY SERIOUSLY DIRECT THE MUSIC VIDEO?!?!? (Yes. Or for the Mayor Petes among us, Ja.)

All this to say, when you turn to a woman who’s spent her entire career immersed in the complexity of massive systems that encompass the lifelong needs of billions of people and ask her to flash a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether it will cost more in taxes, less in taxes, more in net cost, less in net cost, for every single person in every single state at every single income level with every single preexisting condition within that system…

Warren channeled Mr. Loaf himself and said, “I won’t do that. Oh, no. No, I won’t do that.”

And you shouldn’t, Liz. You shouldn’t.

I truly believe that there is no way in heaven, hell, or Cincinnati that we’re going to be able to get to the bottom of the health care needs of our country in fucking 90-second blurbs in which politicians have to balance the need to inform the voting public with the need to ensure their political survival so that they have a whisper of a prayer of eventually enacting the shit they believe in.

Let’s stop talking about health care at these debates, fucking seriously. I say we eliminate the political survival from the debate around health care and let’s have a panel or a round table in which each candidate gets 30 minutes to present the system they believe in, and they can only talk about their own system.

You know, what if we treated health care as if it were a complicated, critically important, life-or-death issue that we absolutely must get right, instead of a political football?

We can do that.

Ja, that was another Meat Loaf reference.

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