You may have already seen this but just in case: It's Jimmy Kimmel on his show last night, talking of how quick hospital-style attention saved the life of his infant son, segueing into a defense of the premise that people, especially children, should not die just because they can't afford medical care. It is amazing that this is a controversial matter but it is.
As Isaac Chotiner notes, Kimmel may have missed his target a bit by blaming "partisanship" instead of the one political party that is pushing for less to be done for people who can't afford or get health insurance without government underwriting.
In a way, it's the perfect rebuttal to Congressman Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) who said the other day that he's in favor of "reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they're healthy, they've done the things to keep their bodies healthy." Someone needs to ask him what Kimmel's newborn baby did to make himself unhealthy…or for that matter, why a guy who gets hit by a car somehow deserves to be bankrupted by hospital bills.
As you may have gleaned from this blog, I ordinarily do not care for Mr. Kimmel and have found his show to be generally unwatchable. I have a general distaste for "comedy" based on the premise that if you shove a camera in the face of someone on the street (or hide one when you prank them) it's great fun to laugh at how they come off as idiots. I don't like that when the others do it either, but Kimmel seems to do a lot of it. The actual writing on his show seems pretty sharp but his delivery always seemed lacking to me, and his interviews seemed snarky and way too smug.
That said, my opinion of him went up with his Oscar hosting and it's gone up a few more notches for this segment. Maybe, if I ever clear all the unwatched other shows off my TiVo, I'll give him another chance. This is about as real a moment as I've ever seen on a talk show…