Stephen Colbert’s Riotously Funny Interview of a Lobbyist for Universal Healthcare

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By  |  October 12, 2009 | 

In the 9th installment of his 35,000 part series, “Better Know a Lobby,” Colbert interviews the head of “Health Care for America Now,” Richard Kirsch.

The whole thing is hilarious, but the funniest portion comes at 3:45, when Colbert asks Kirsch to choose between saving universal healthcare or an old lady from drowning.

The healthcare debate in Washington has been so depressing, do yourself a favor and spend 5 minutes watching the best satirist of our generation do his thing.

[Sorry – there’s a 30 second commercial that you’ll have to tolerate before the interview begins.]

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About the Author: Bob Wachter

Robert M. Wachter, MD is Professor and Interim Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he holds the Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine. He is also Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine. He has published 250 articles and 6 books in the fields of quality, safety, and health policy. He coined the term hospitalist” in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article and is past-president of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He is generally considered the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He is also a national leader in the fields of patient safety and healthcare quality. He is editor of AHRQ WebM&M, a case-based patient safety journal on the Web, and AHRQ Patient Safety Network, the leading federal patient safety portal. Together, the sites receive nearly one million unique visits each year. He received one of the 2004 John M. Eisenberg Awards, the nation’s top honor in patient safety and quality. He has been selected as one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S. by Modern Healthcare magazine for the past eight years, the only academic physician to achieve this distinction; in 2015 he was #1 on the list. He is a former chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and has served on the healthcare advisory boards of several companies, including Google. His 2015 book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, was a New York Times science bestseller.

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