‘The Pitt' season two will depict Trump's Medicaid cuts, immigrant healthcare in new storyline
John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, the executive producers of the show — which follows the lives of healthcare professionals at a Pittsburgh hospital juggling office politics, crises and the challenges of caring for the critically ill — say that season two of the show will feature a bit of a different plot.
"We take our platform very seriously," Gemmill told Variety, in a piece published on Thursday.
"I think one of the things when you can reach 10 million people — and this was true back in the day on 'ER' as well — is with that amount of people listening, you have to be responsible for what you put out there," Gemmill added.
"The Pitt" star Noah Wyle, who plays Dr. "Robby" Robinavitch, said he sees the show as a sort of mirror.
"We have a certain safety net in just being a realistic drama by trying to depict what it looks like in a hospital," Wyle said. "You're not making value judgments. You're just painting a picture, and if it's accurate enough, and it's representative enough, it becomes a bit of a Rorschach test. You see what you want to see in it, and you draw your own conclusions from it. If it looks like the system is untenable, unfair, and skewed towards one population over another, maybe it is."
Executive producer John Wells said the show will incorporate recent events into the second season.
"The Medicaid changes are going to have a significant impact, and you don't have to take a political position to discuss what the impact is actually going to be," Wells said.
"I don't want to have an argument about whether or not they're appropriate, what Congress did or didn't do. But they're going to have on-the-ground, immediate consequences in emergency rooms, and nobody's arguing with that," he added. "That's a bipartisan agreement. You've got very Republican senators from Missouri like Josh Hawley agreeing that this is going to be a problem."
The author of the Variety piece, Max Gao, also said the show will "inevitably" feature "Real-time concerns about patient care, including the treatment of undocumented and immigrant families amid the recent ICE raids."
Fox News Digital reached out to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., for comment, and was referred to recent comments Hawley made in a press release introducing legislation to prevent future cuts to Medicaid, which read, "President Trump has always said we have to protect Medicaid for working people. Now is the time to prevent any future cuts to Medicaid from going into effect."
Hawley added in the statement that, "We should also increase our support for rural hospitals around the country. Under the recent reconciliation bill, Missouri will see an extra $1 billion for hospitals over the next four years. I want to see Medicaid reductions stopped and rural hospitals fully funded permanently."
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