On Health Care Debate, Stepping Back to Laugh

Ze Frank, usually a jokester, takes a semi-serious look at health care in this video

Master of all things viral Ze Frank usually produces web videos that fall clearly in the "comedy" category, but in a video for Time he gets semi-serious and tries to understand the health care debate. He doesn't really succeed, by his own admission, but he draws some interesting conclusions, and makes some solid jokes, along the way. Is this the first step in Frank's evolution from jokester to pundit?

• Skewed Debate  "The first thing I learned is that it's complicated," he said. "The second thing I learned is that this is not a health care debate. This is a health care argument. People are angry. And when people argue when they're angry, they start saying things that don't make sense."

• Untrustworthy Leaders   "And to be honest I started getting angry," he said. "Because it felt like every time I tried to find a piece of information on this health care argument, someone was trying to lie to me." Frank said he wished politicians were more like doctors, "someone who has my best interests at heart instead of someone who's trying to scare me."

• Too Much Information  Lamenting the vast array of confusing and contradictory information, Frank focused on the abundance of pie charts. "We need broccoli charts and wheat graphs," he said.

• Where to Turn?  "Health is fundamental. It's important and it's personal," he said. "It's a complicated issue and it's hard to know who to trust." He concluded, "Along the way we'll have to answer some pretty difficult questions, like how much we're willing to pay and how much we're all in this together. But at least for now, we have our health. Sort of."