Another day, another groundless claim from the anti-health reform cadre.
Today’s lesson from fantasyland comes from the editorial page of Investors Business Daily, which has already fallaciously claimed that the Obama health care plan would ban private health insurance. Strap yourself in, kids, because this one is a doozy.
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
And why is this such a jim-dandy of a whopping great big gaffe?
(Deep breath)
Because Hawking is British. Born in Oxford, raised in St. Albans and London, and, since 1979, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Not Cambridge, Mass., but Cambridge in Cambridgeshire in England. So he has spent his entire life under NHS medical care. In fact, when he had to go to hospital earlier this year for pneumonia, he went to Addenbrooks, which is (drum roll, please) an NHS hospital.
The editorial then indulges in this mote-plank-eye moment:
The British have succeeded in putting a price tag on human life, as we are about to.
Sorry, so what exactly are insurance premiums? And on that note, a 67-year-old academic with advanced motor neurone disease? That sounds like a pre-existing condition. Which private health insurance provider would cover him?
This article appears in August 7 • 2009.
