Ingram's June 2026

BETWEEN THE LINES

Pointed Perspectives & Penetrating Punditry | by Jack Cashill

Americans Will Find Socialized Medicine Hard to Swallow

Perspectives from two continents hint of the real challenges with single-payer health care.

Two summers ago, on Election Day in France, I was doing some editing and intermittently checking the (discouraging) French results when I heard French being spoken outside my lakeside cottage in western New York. It seemed oddly coincidental that my neighbor would have French friends visit on their Election Day, but I paid the con versation little mind. Moments later, however, the neighbor stopped by and asked me to come speak to these people. They weren’t friends. They were strangers who just showed up. I happily obliged. Rare is the opportunity for me to speak with people whose English is worse than my French. As Antoine explained, he and his wife, Gabrielle, and 8-year old daughter, Rose, were driving from Pittsburgh, where his sister lived, to Niagara Falls. Taking the lake route from Erie to Buffalo, about a hun dred-mile stretch, they turned up our street on a whim to get a better look at Lake Erie. There were hundreds of streets they might have chosen, but they chose ours and voila! —here was someone who could speak to them. Quelle coincidence!

I had a Fulbright grant to teach at a nearby university. Now his head was spinning, too. If I understood right, his father was mayor of Malzéville during the time we lived there. Although his father had died, his mother still lived there, but, alas, she has dementia. “So does our president,” I said ruefully. Antoine explained that he was now 52 years old and regretted that he could not be of more help to his poor mother. “Did you say you were 52?” I asked. I was never very good with French numbers. Yes, he was. I was shocked. “I would have guessed 32. You seem so young and healthy.” Antoine sighed and looked at

Gabrielle across the table, won dering, I suspect, if he should tell his story. “Not everything is as it seems,” he said. Antoine pointed to his arm, ampu tated at the elbow, that he carried in a sling. So efferves cent was the guy I barely noticed. Two years ago, he told us, while

The coincidences we all saw were building toward something beyond coin cidence. For starters, they lived in Antibes, in the south of France, a place I knew well. I told them how years ago, when my family and I were staying in Nice for a week, I went looking for a sandy beach for my toddler and stumbled across a little spot on Cap d’Antibes called the “Plage de la Garoupe.” Later, doing research on F. Scott Fitzgerald, I learned that his wealthy patrons, Sarah and Gerald Murphy, carved this sandy stretch out of the area’s rocky

A chance meeting on the shores of Lake Erie shows that when it comes to heath care, mere happenstance can build into something more significant than coincidence.

coasts. The Murphys made the plage the summer place to be for the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso and others among the rich and famous. Coincidentally, the tiny Plage de la Garoupe was the favored spot for Antoine and his family. I should have known. I invited him and his family in for drinks. My wife, Joan, joined us. The coincidences, we all saw, continued to stack. As Antoine explained, although he lived in Antibes, he was originally from a small village in northeast France that he was sure I had never heard of, an obscure town of 8,000 people called Malzéville. Now my head was spinning. The year we visited Nice, I told Antoine, we lived in Malzéville.

mountain biking, he took a spill and wounded his elbow. French health care being as “horrible” as it is—his word, different pronunciation, same meaning—the doctors failed to stem a vicious infection that was now eating away at his body. The French doctors with any tal- ent, he explained, flee the confines of the nation’s state-run health system for greener pastures abroad. Taking their place are third-worlders for

Jack Cashill Ingram’s Senior Editor P | 816.842.9994 E | Editorial @ Ingrams.com

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June 2026