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good morning. i'm ali velshi. multiple states are now taking measures never before seen in u.s. history and a major effort to stomp the extremely contagious novel coronavirus. in addition to shuttering non-essential businesses citizens are being told stay-at-home. there are 19,444 cases of covid-19 here in the united states. there's been 247 deaths. i say at least because the numbers increase by the minute.

this all comes as medical professionals and officials from across the country continue to sound the alarm that they are running out of life-saving supplies and equipment while the president continues to talks about what the mostly cloudy skies is doing to solve that problem. >> when will every american who needs a test get a test and be able to get a test? and why not have medical equipment being shipped right now to hospitals? >> we're hearing very positive things about testing. we don't want every american to go out and get a test. 350 million people. we don't want that. we want people that have a problem. >> there are americans that say they have symptoms and they can't get tested. what do you say. >> i'm not hearing it. >> i'm not hearing that. michele is a trained reporter, she doesn't ask questions incorrectly. she said there are americans like the one you're looking at right here who have symptoms and need a test.

the president said he had not heard of that. i'll wave my arms in case anyone at the white house is watching this thing to turn thunder and let the president listen to this. my next guest, sara samir, an airplanes veteran, a mother of two young children who has been experiencing covid-19 symptoms. she's been turn away from her local va. what's the situation? why have you not been able to get a coronavirus test? >> first couple of days of march i started to feel a little off and then my symptoms increasingly got worse. about a week and a few days, march 11th i decided to call the va after hearing everybody ask if you have these symptoms contact your primary and since i get all my health care through the va i contacted by primary

health care on the 11th and was basically told don't come here, we can't test you. i straight up asked her point blank do you have the ability to test. if i were to come there and they said no. that was march 11th. they called back a few times that day to make sure that i knew not to come in. don't go the va. don't go to the er. they will not allow you -- sorry -- they won't allow you to come in even if you do show up, if you have symptoms. stay home. treat your symptoms. i called back a few times that day. next day got randomly overnighted medications which was an antibiotic and an inhaler without of being seen. >> well -- >> i'm not sure -- >> you got coronavirus antibiotics won't help you. so you are -- as a veteran you are covered by the va, but the

va wouldn't see you. you can't without otherwise going private hospital where you have to pay. apparently the testing is free at private hospitals now but the va told you to go to the er on thursday. what happened then? >> i'm not able to hear you. >> okay. we got an audio problem with sara. we'll try to fix that and come back to her. she's an air force veteran who has been struggling to get a coronavirus test. i bring that point up because the president said he has not heard any stories about people who need tests and can't get them. joining me from boston is a doctor who is an infectious disease physician. she's an associate professor at boston university school of medicine and the medical director of special path pathog. she specializes in emerging

pathogens. it sounds like everything she does makes her exactly the person you talk about in the current situation. thank you for being with us. you heard some of what sara said. i just want to clear thunder. because the president said to the esteemed journalist yesterday that he has not heard of people who need tests, who can't get them. that would make him, i think, the only american who has not heard of american who need tests and unable to get them. >> yeah. thank you. the issue here is one of the biggest troubles with this particular virus is that the symptoms of this look like everything else. and so in these situations the test allows us to differentiate between somebody who has this virus that requires a lot more social distancing, that requires isolation in their home and if they need medical care to actually come to medical facilities quicker and that

testing whether it's in the facilities or outside through drive-throughs or with innovative solutions such as home testing would really help us get ahead of this curve. what's surprising to me, i worked in 2014 and 2015, i worked in west africa as an ebola, a physician in the ebola treatment units and that was a situation that had so few resources. not enough health care workers, personal protective equipment was lacking. we have a health care system that has so much more resilience, had so many more resources and i've been so shocked how behind the curve we've been at every stage of this epidemic, the testing. we're in the third month of this. even hospitals are having -- yeah. the testing is still -- >> in you west africa, ebola in west africa the average amount of money spent per person, per capita in health care is about $1. the one thing that happened during ebola is when we started to see cases in the united

states we were able to completely get on top of that and deal with that and the last real sense. if there's an ebola outbreak in new york we called 911 and you knew how it was handled and nobody died of it here. we would have assumed you could apply that same spending which is something close to $10 per year in capita in america and yet the money is all there. and we still have problems. we can't get tests, can't get our administration to be on the same page. yesterday dr. anthony fauci corrected the president twice in a press conference on what's going on. so people think there are drugs, everybody can get a test, they think young people don't get this illness or die from it. we're suffering from an information problem as much as an infection. >> yeah. i agree. not only that but i think, the inertia is unbelievable. we knew that this disease was in this country since january. why weren't we getting the testing. we knew looking at italy's

experience and china's experience that our hospitals, our health care systems will face this. health care systems and hospitals have been preparing this. why weren't we investing in creating more personal protective equipment doing this months before now while we see patients in emergency rooms and ensuring we don't get to a place where there's pinch points that affect care of those not just coming in with this infection but every other american who requires health care. >> you made the point like many other experts like you have made, that there are some very basic public health ways to deal with a highly infectious disease. you i've infected people and then you either, screen them or test them. you isolate them. and then, by the way, you have to figure out how to keep health care workers safe. that last one we're struggling with. university of california, san francisco said they are down to 200 swabs for their test kits. they don't have any more. i spoke to a doctor in michigan

who said they are keeping facemasks, doctors are using the he same facemasks for a whole day. i spoke to somebody in your state massachusetts yesterday who said there's an emergency shortage of basic supplies that are needed for health care professionals. if that part of the system breaks down, that affects not just everybody who might get coronavirus but everybody who has anything. heart attack. appendix. anything else you would go to a doctor or hospital for. >> and that's already happening. you might have heard many of the elective surgery, many routine primary care visits all of those have dropped and we're moving to telehealth and other innovative ways that allow us to keep social distancing, to allow us not bring crowded patients -- crowd patients in to the same space where one person is infected they may spread to it other people. but the health care piece is an important part.

health care workers are the most critical part of the response to any outbreak. whether it's h1n1 or ebola. you know that once you start losing health care workers to illness, whether they have to stay home or get critically ill you're losing foot soldiers and potentially responding to the larger group of patients who are coming in. >> thank you for being with us. joining me now in washington, republican senator bill cassidy of louisiana. he's a doctor and a former hospital physician who has extensive experience working with the uninsured. thank you for joining us, senator. first and foremost how are you and your family doing? >> not hearing, guys. >> okay. we got an audio problem with the senator. we'll take a quick break and

come back. i was checking with my -- wait what do you want to do? we'll take a quick break. velshi continues right after this. stay with us. right after this stay with us as a marine, i flew 89 combat missions in iraq and afghanistan. as a national security advisor, i worked to keep our country safe. i'm amy mcgrath. now i'm running for senate in kentucky against mitch mcconnell. i can win, but i need your help. with your contribution, we can finally remove mitch mcconnell from office and start repairing the damage he's done to our country.

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all right. we have fixed the gremlins. we have republican senator bill cassidy of louisiana back with us. he's a senator. that makes him uniquely important today because they are deciding on how to deal with this crisis. he's also a doctor, a

information hospital physician. he has extensive experience working with the uninsured. your wife is also a surgeon. senator, good to see you. how are you zmoing how is your family holding up? how is your state doing >> my family is doing well. my state is severely impacted. we're trying to control that on a constant communication with my governor and his staff, what can we do to help him as he attempts to work with the people of our state to control the infection. >> given your perspective on this as a medical doctor, this is something that's got people very, very frightened, a lot of anxiety out there. we don't have a whole lot of people in our congress who are doctors. tell me how you see this as a doctor. >> there's a duality that somebody has not seen a case in their community they don't believe it's a problem and think it's all hyped up. if you have one case quite

likely you'll have 300 times as many cases in two weeks. because new orleans a week ago monday had one case. and now they have probably this morning i haven't checked but 600. so it spread like that. so just because you don't have a lot of disease in your community don't have a sense of complacency. it's coming at you. on the other hand if you have only one two cases you have the potential to contain. that's why people should stay home even if their community is currently uninfected. >> as a medical professional and united states senator how do you deal with the mixed messaging we've been dealing with? >> one message has come through loud and clear. flatten the curve. the way to flatten the curve is for individuals to be responsible. if you take a walk, walk by yourself or your spouse or somebody whom you're living but don't congregate with people who you don't live with. i carry around -- i have a

clorox wipe that your camera guy just supplied me and when i'm through i'll wipe down everything. wash your hands multiple times. now all that seems artificial but now it actually matters. so personal responsibility, doing unto others as you have them do unto others. you don't want to be infected, so don't infect other people. >> senator, that's the good part. that's the stuff that we or anybody watching or listening to you or listening to their doctors or listening on tv can do. then the parts we need to you do and that is figure out how we deal with an economy that's slowly and somewhat deliberately grinding to a halt. >> totally with you. now i'll speak once more like a physician. once 40% -- right now when one person is infected he or she infects two three other people who then infect two to three poerm, that's why you get this rise. now we lated concept is once 40%

of the population is immune, which means they've been infected and have recovered, once 40% is infected and recovered immune, then the virus can't spread as rapidly, instead of infecting two to three other people somebody may only infect one person and the rate of infection begins to decline. we need to know two thing. what's at any rate of immunity wane given community and is someone in particular immune. like we carry vaccination cards for you our children so they can enter school a nurse's aide will have a blood test to know she's immune so when she goes to a nursing home she won't infect people there. if you're not immune or isolated you need to be careful. we need to have those two bits of information. is somebody immune and what's the overall immunity within a population. when we know those two factors our economy can recover and we

can open up commerce. >> when are you guys going to be able to get a bill passed? >> we hope to vote on the bill tomorrow. we submitted things late into last night. i'm sure the leadership staff in both parties and the white house have worked through night. we'll work through it all the way today and sunday and vote on it on monday. >> senator, thank you for joining me, sir. please keep your family safe and your community. senator bill cassidy of louisiana. while the senate does don't debate that trillion dollar coronavirus stimulus package the united states is inching to an economic catastrophe. house lawmakers have done their part in passing a bill. congressman joe kennedy joins us next. he has his own idea to help americans get back on their feet. p americans get back on their feet a higher risk of stroke due to afib not caused by a heart valve problem. so if there's a better treatment than warfarin... i want that too. eliquis. eliquis is proven to reduce stroke risk better than warfarin.

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we're having them shipped directly to states. we need certain equipment that states are unable to get by themselves so we're invoking to it use the powers of the federal government to help the states get things that they need like the masks, like the ventilators. >> that was a statement by the president after saying he would only invoke the defense production act, that's what he was talking about in the worst case scenario. as hospitals face essential supply shortages that act would push u.s. manufacturers to construct medical equipment for hospital distribution and create medical supplies but one pediatric surgeon tells the "new york times" the cracks in our medical and financial systems are being open like a dashing wound. while a california surgeon says she has limited access to respirators and bay civil surgical masks. we're at war with no ammo. joining me now is epidemiologist dr. joseph ferrer.

we're getting conflicting information. all the information from people like you, health care professionals, public health officials say the same thing that there's a shortage of supplies. they are reusing masks in hospitals. san francisco says they have 200 swabs left. there's an equipment shortage. then we got the president saying we don't have a testing shortage and we don't need to invoke this act to get these things made. what's the truth? >> i think the truth is from the ground. if you're hearing hospitals and front line workers tell you that they are not just going saying that because it makes them look good or feel good. they are in war-like conditions without the tools they need to fight the fight. if you think if this was a nuclear explosion or a chemical spill would we take this long to respond to it? no. these like bombs that go off over a long period of time and every second we delay in getting the people that are on the front

line, the tools they need, it's only going to get worse and then health care workers themselves will start to get infected themselves without the proper equipment. we cannot afford to lose those people and right now we're leaving them with nothing to fight the fight. >> so we've been discussing for a few weeks ever flattening the curve. the same number of people may get infected in the end but if you can do it over a longer period of time you don't tax the health care system. i know when we were talking about this in earlier days we were talking about icu beds, things like that. now we're talking about hospital and medical care staff that's laid off, about not having personal protective equipment so front line workers may get ill without having enough test kits and things like that. that's different from the capacity of the health care system. we're actually possibly in danger of diminishing the capacity of our health care system right now. >> absolutely.

we're facing a shortage on every front not only the needed equipment and supplies, the number of people required to care for these individuals, the institutional capacity itself just physically. we don't have that set up yet. in california at least, you know, they invoked the law where they can take over hospitals and use those as isolation wards but we haven't gotten to that point nationwide. it comes back it's to not just hospital workers or the tests. this requires a multi-lateral effort and the social distancing is a he key part of that. and you can see on beaches from florida that's not being done every where. unless we all do it and aldo it at the same time in combination with getting those testing and personal protective equipment out for the health care workers this is just going keep going and going and getting worse and our economy is going to feel that. in addition and more importantly the cost to human life. >> talk to me about what the best solution for that is, because you and others like you

have been able to identify with great specificity the things that need to be done, the supplies, the equipment, the uniformity in the approach in terms much shutdowns or social distancing or limiting gatherings as you said in florida they weren't doing it for a while. i guess coming back to the same idea if we look at the successes in singapore, in hong kong and japan, it was about a coordinated response at the national level. >> yes. they had leadership. and leadership that took it seriously because their people were dying. we don't have that right now. and we get conflicting messages between what's happening on the ground versus what you see in a white house briefing. and that leads, to you know, half of the people not taking this seriously because, you know, there are cult like followers of every white house briefing, they take every word of that for truth. all you have to do is walk into a hospital to see that that is

not the reality on the ground and so you listen to your troops on the ground if you're in a war and we're in a war time situation with this disease. >> ron cline told me on tv last night we need to stop listen to the briefings and listen only to medical and public health officials. we listen to you very closely and we're indebted to you for bringing us the newest and up to date reliable information. u.s. lawmakers are looking to take a good hard look,000 repair the nation during this crisis and america's most vulnerable and impoverished are counting on it. you're watching velshi on msnbc. . [♪]

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the republican proposal provides massive tax breaks and subsidies to the wealthy and very large corporations while providing little to no assistance to the people most in need. and that's our lowest income people and working families all across this country. >> senator bernie sanders calling senate republicans coronavirus economic proposal totally inadequate as lawmakers in congress work through the weekend to put together a stimulus bill to help affected americans. we know direct payments are at the center of that bill. most workers would get about $1,200, $2400 for couples and extra $500 for each child. americans who didn't make enough

money to pay federal income taxco see as little as $600. i'm sorry this graphic is so small so that you can't see that part. $600 if you didn't pay taxes. my next guest says we need better than that and proposing direct payment for every american regardless of income. joining me now is congressman joe kennedy. why direct payments for all americans? i certainly don't need one. >> a couple of points here. one, it is, in fact, universal. which is if you talk to any economist the best way to stimulate the economy. two, the proposals that we've seen from our senate counterparts is not anywhere near enough. i've done town halls across the state over the course of the past several months. the average social security pay out is about $1,200. in front of those people i asked how many can live in massachusetts. not a single hand has ever gone up. not once. the idea that you're going to

somehow be able to make ends meet for families a month, two months off of this is laughable. just shows you're completely divorced from reality. up need something far more generous. third my proposal is there's an option to have it continue so if our economy still struggles through this recovery, we're able to ensure that american families are, in fact, taken care of. the economic stimulus here is important but what is far more important is making sure american families can make ends meet. that's the point. >> yeah. >> last piece -- >> secondary here, you're talking about $4,000 in annual direct cash payments to adults earning less than $100,000. $2,000 per child for families in the same income bracket. estimates are looking at $1,200, $600 if you don't pay income tax. a whole bunch of people who don't earn enough to pay income tax pay a lot of money in tax, consumption tax and things like that. we won't fix anything that's

broken in society with $600 payments to the least among us. >> you're not going to come close. that still forces you to choose between going to work and paying your rent, paying your mortgage, paying your prescription medication. we got millions of people in this country uninsured. how are they supposed to cope with the pandemic. to your comments earlier, this is an economic crisis. brought on by a health care crisis because our government did not have a system set up to care for every single american. what do we have to do? we have to the tell me to stay home and shutdown. that's created an economic crisis. that means that the federal government has to step in and say hey we're in this together. we're going to make sure we get through this together. make sure we stay healthy together, get healthy together and get our economy together. that's not what the senate republican proposal is what that's right of my proposal is about. >> congressman, i want to ask you to stay with me because i really want to have this conversation in great depth. i want to bring in a few other

people who specialize in this as you do. the ref rand barber who is chairman of poor people's campaign. a professor of law at uci law. and a staff writer at the new yorker. author of "below average edge." andre perry joins us as well. author of the upcoming book "know your price." reverend let me start with you because you really have devoted your -- i'm sorry reverend barber will join us in a second. she lashing let me go to you. what the congressman says here is important and that is that we have some structural inequality in our society yet somehow while rifling through the sofa we found half a billion dollars basically a day to prop up the financial system which by the way is not being reflected in stock markets and there are a lot of people who are not crazy

lefties, who are not socialists, who not hate the capitalist system who say hold on is there not some way if we drop half a trillion dollars day, a trillion dollar bill coming out of the united states senate we can deal with structural inequalities we're facing in this country? >> this is a moment when we can really look at the 2008 financial crisis and hopefully take some lessons from that. so that time around we had the nation's brightest economic minds urging natural we bail out the bank. there was a lot of concern about bank failures. we created a tax payer funded $700 billion bail out for the largest financial institutions, yet there were millions of americans who lost their homes and lost their jobs and what we saw since then is that economic inequality in this country exploded. and before this current crisis hit it was at historic levels.

so i think we really need to look back at what we did wrong the last time and try not to make those mistakes now. i want seems like the current situation is much more dire. and we want to have a much broader bail out in mind, not just of banks, not just to focus on where the dowens and s&p 500 index are but focus on american families and what they need to get through this. >> american family is under remarkable threat right now. you know, how do we think about turning this around. the problem with this type much crisis we have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. we know we can rally and get the money that we need to do these things but how do we make sure that people going into this crisis who are poor or disadvantaged or uninsured or underemployed or gig workers do not come out on the other end worse like they did the last crisis. if you went into the last crisis

with credit and money you came out far better than anybody else did. but if you didn't, you came out worse. income equality got worse. >> absolutely. so 40% of americans can't get $500 in the next, you know, three weeks if they have an additional expense like their job goes away. 40% of americans. we're not just talk about the destitute. in the alternative world there's a button that the federal reserve can push and infuse $5 billion into the repo markets when those repo markets need liquidity. then millions of americans like i said 40% of americans that need that button also. just give us liquidity. give people 500, 1,000, way more than congressman kennedy said. we need more than $1,000. more than enough to tide over

our losses. these have long term effects on people's credit, availability to get certain housing and rentals, school loan, all of that stuff has long lasting effect. we the still have an 80% of the population that hasn't fully recovered from the last crisis. right. last crisis he same thing. we made sure that the banks made profitability, we made sure the stock market was booming but not all american that suffered the the americans that suffered most made it back. so this crisis is very much a crisis that's going to affect as all crises do the lowest income americans the most acutely and worse. there will be health care costs and food, all of those scarcities. >> reverend william barber, he's on the phone with us. reverend, you are the co-chairman, our viewers know of you because you are the co-chairman of something called the poor people's campaign.

maybe in this dark cloud there's a silver lining and that's we have an opportunity to take this emergency that we are in, the fact that our economy is now grinding to a halt and we got to do something to stimulate it to do it in a way that actually helps the poor, the decity institute, the underemployed, less educated among us, the homeless. what do you want to see done in the course of the next days and weeks as we try repair our economy to make it less unhe' call. >> thank you very much. before this crisis, the last crisis of 700 people dying a day from poverty. we did not call that an emergen emergency. so we were planning on having it. in june we'll see how to do it in different ways.

we just the other night had people on moveon.org and said poverty a pandemic a response to covid-19. first of all, we have to stop saying the emergency started with covid-19. there was already an emergency. one think tank at harvard they live on intelligent of our society and what we see what we have now have built a response, a pattern of marginal exclusion and discrimination that has gone on for years that we did not address. but when we talked earlier about health care it would cost too much or a living wage would cost too much. one of the things that concerns me is that we do not have -- what happens in these moments we

deal with the immediate fix and then go back to normalcy. we put out a 21 step plan. we can't go back to normalcy when it comes to health care, living wages and protecting those that live at the bottom, 140 million people in this country that were already in crisis. >> these numbers are amazing and they are stagger. andre, i had a conversation earlier with sara raskin and sheila blair that we understand that in this money that goes out like the ik in germany have done, we got to inject some of that so small businesses, the businesses around me here in manhattan that are just shut down, laying off their staff, restaurant, cafe, mom and pop stores are closing down. let me quote from an article that you wrote in february in which you said black people represent 12.7% of the population but only 4.3% of the nation's 22.2 million business

owners. one of the things you and i talk about a lot when it comes to wealth gap between african-americans and rest of society is the ability, one piece is housing and the other piece is business. do you see an opportunity here for us to try to right some of this several hundred year old inequity? >> absolutely. these storms in cad mix r micks may be colorblind but our policies to address the aftermath have not been. and the consequences have meant that black people, poor people without wealth have been increasingly burdened by the inevitable tragedies that keep occurring. and so that number that only 4% of black people represented in business is a direct result of the housing policies after the new deal because most people start businesses using housing

equity. and because black people were excluded from a lot of the new deal, we are not able to start our businesses at the same rates. so, again, for this tragedy, we should not repeat the mistakes of the past. i'm somewhat against universal remedies because they don't address the real differences, the real wealth differences that many of us live in. even when a middle class american, upper middle class american like myself, i have less wealth and i'm less able to deal with the financial crisis because of past policy. so, if we don't deal with the -- >> i'm going to interrupt you there. i think we need to underscore this point. let just be very clear on what you just said. you are an upper middle class american. you earn well. you're a professional.

highly educated. but you have less wealth than the median american. let's be stark here. because you are african-american. because you have not had three, four, five generations of accumulated wealth in your family that was willed to you, is that correct? >> that's correct. in my forthcoming point "know your price" i talk about my father's history living in detroit. he lived in areas that were devalued by racism, and he -- what's criminalized. he died in a prison at the hand of someone else. but he also died as a direct result because his community did not have the wealth to put him in a drug treatment facility. they did not have the wealth to have great schools. if we don't address the wealth disparities now they will continue or maybe even be exacerbated by universal drops

to everyone and that do not recognize the real differences that we had. >> yeah. reverend barber, let's talk about that. let's talk about the opportunities that we have at this moment. you talk about it from the perspective of poor of poor peo let's broaden this out. there is wealth disparity. there is income inequality that we know about in america and that's across races and genders chs we have 500,000 people sleeping on the streets or in shelters every night t. we have 40 million people in american who do not know -- they're not sure about where today's food is coming from. we have inequality in the funding of our public schools. we've got crushing student debt. in your 21, is there a way to sort of say we're putting this kind of money in every day, the questions we've been asking of our leader social security how will you pay for this? how are you pay for this? we're paying for it now, reverend.

>> and we'll continue to pay for it and the first one of the lies we have to deal with is the lies of scarcity. we have the money. we've always had it. the money is there in our loaded defense budget. the money is there in unnecessary tax cuts to the wealthy. what we have not had is the will to do it. take for instance kentucky. the other day, this is the example. mcconnell said he's described voting for this plan. it doesn't even address the issues and even with the democrats the other day, they pulled out the part of the bill that would make sure all workers would be covered under this unpaid leave. it leaves out millions of people and if you read down in the piece on the thousand dollars, the poorer you are the less money you get so we have to start from a very different place and understand if we don't address these issues. so for instance in kentucky, 59%

of the dhichildren are poor in kentucky. 46% are poor and no income in ty ty and yet we have mcconnell not willing to focus on these issues not before the crisis but everyone after the crisis has hit. we need immediate living wage. we need health care for everybody. we need incomes, we need national moratoriums on addictions a egymnastievictio evictions and i could go on down the line. and we have to -- we're going to have racism, we have to address the whole poverty piece. what i mean by that is 61% are poor and low wealth. dr. king told us in 1965 to only deal with this issue is to get

black poor people and white poor people and brown poor people to see them as a coalition together to stand against the ravages of poverty, racism, economic devastation, the war economy and the false religious naturalization that says poverty is not an issue you ought to be dealing with in the public square when it is a major issue. when we do that we can still -- a different dynamic and hopefully that will happen. >> congressman kennedy, the reverend has got a point there. poor black people, poor brown people, poor white people are all going to get hurt by this recession which might be mr. than a recession fairly soon. what do you say to the criticism about the fact that even the proposal put forward by democrats doesn't go far enough for the poor? >> i think the reverend is right now and he -- the reason why he's one of the moral leaders of our time. the fact is i think what you're

seeing play out today is a complete and total rejection in real time of republican ideology over the course of the past several decades. a tax cut is not going to solve a pandemic period. you are not going to dynamically score your way out of this. so what you've got is a pandemic. we care for everybody because this is how we're actually going to make sure that everybody is in fact healed. you can't say all of a sudden that we're going to not care for some people or not give health insurance to some people or not care for various slices of our society. in a pandemic, those folks are still going to get sick and those folks are going to spread it to everybody else. we have an opportunity here to lay out what it mean for our country, to actually make sure that our economy does in fact work for everybody, it empowers everybody, that you've got a health care system that cares for everybody, you've got an opportunity here to make sure

that those cracks are in fact healed because it's not only the right thing to do and the moral thing to do but it is how you actually create a stronger country and that's what we have and i think -- i've been touched with our leadership over the course of the past several days. we're writing our own bill in response to the senate republicans version where how they've framed these issues and the response doesn't actually address the fundamental lesson of this moment. coronavirus has -- has been a diagnostic dye throughout our society to show just -- to highlight those fractures and fissures and how they come back around to affect every one of us. we can do better. >> it's largely the great equal lyser unless of course you're rich and have fantastic health care. thank you for your time. special thanks to our panel, the reverend william barber joining us over the phone. andre perry and joe kennedy.

and that does it for me this hour. my friend joy reed picks things up next on a.m. joy. joy reed pi up next on a.m. joy. (bobby) with your hearing, if you start having a little trouble,

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. officials are warning that the spread of coronavirus in the u.s. appears inevitable. >> i don't think it's inevitable. >> blaming the quote, fake news. >> this is the new hoax.

>> the country is in great shape. the market is in great shape. >> the coronavirus has put the markets into a free fall leaving some investors in panic. >> the nation's top infectious disease doctor admits testing has been a failure. >> how would you rate your response to this crisis? >> i'd rate it at ten. >> there's a possibility that millions of americans could eventually die. >> and now here we are. trump cannot be trusted with our economy, our health and our future. >> good morning and welcome to a.m. joy. well, that dra mat i believe mah the american bridge pack running right now in three states lays out in devastating fashion donald trump and his administration's failures in their slow and disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. trump spent weeks downplaying how serious it was egged on by close