On last night’s installment of Comedy Central’s The Jim Jefferies Show, the perpetually unimpressed Jefferies steered his fledgling political comedy series into the bullshit-strewn vortex of the current American health care debate, as have all of his late night colleagues of late. Naturally, this being Jim Jefferies, his take on the Republican Party’s attempt to kick 22 million people off of their health insurance, cut $800 billion from Medicaid, and funnel all of that sweet, sweet cancer treatment cash into their own pockets and those of their wealthiest donors emerged as a persuasively crude mix of high and low. (If you want your heartfelt arguments in favor of health care for all mixed in with several iterations of the word “cunt,” Jim Jefferies is your guy.)
Citing his experience, both as a visitor from Down Under (with its government-subsidized insurance) and a recipient of completely free British medical treatment after a bloody 2004 assault there, the cheekily irate Jefferies took issue mainly with Americans’ singularly blinkered conception of universal health care as a privilege and not a right, a stance at odds with nearly every other developed nation in the world. Again taking both high and low roads simultaneously, Jefferies questioned why we view public services as a right to be taken for granted, but not heathcare, since, as he put it, “I know how to put out a small fire. I don’t know how to get rid of a little bit of AIDS.” Producing his own international menu of health care options (called JimCare), Jefferies suggested—with a mix of sound health care policy and comical cultural stereotypes—that, with just a cursory look at the global health care options, we as a nation can whip up approximately 22 million better ideas than the Republicans.