I just listened to a report on the BBC news about a woman in Chicago who had to wait three months to go to a doctor after discovering lumps in a breast and an armpit. She had just started a new job and her medical insurance didn’t kick in until she was off her probationary period. Then, once she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she went bankrupt trying to pay her portion of the 80:20 coverage. Worse, her doctors had to keep asking the insurance company for permission to do a test or a procedure.

Frankly, I was embarrassed for my country.

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[NO SPOILERS AHEAD] The penultimate episode of Monk begins with a murder at the PalgroveBirthing Center. The setting is tangential to the plot (that doesn’t count as a spoiler, does it?), but the show nevertheless included a bit of dialogue in which the center’s head (Ed Begley, Jr.) carefully explains that midwives are not nurses, and help ensure healthy home births. It’s all put very positively — a defense of Certified Professional Midwives — and is so obviously extraneous that it makes you wonder why it was inserted. I wonder if Ed Begley agreed to take the tiny role on condition that the show insert the midwifery product placement. (This is the guess also of our midwife daughter, whose site, btw, is under construction.)