Ezra Klein:
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has a Wall Street Journal op-ed today in which he uses the emergency heart surgery conducted on his daughter 27 years ago as an argument against the Affordable Care Act. “I don’t even want to think what might have happened if she had been born at a time and place where government defined the limits for most insurance policies and set precedents on what would be covered,” he writes. “Would the life-saving procedures that saved her have been deemed cost-effective by policy makers deciding where to spend increasingly scarce tax dollars?”
Here’s the odd thing: At no point in his op-ed does Johnson ever argue that the Affordable Care Act would’ve made his daughter’s surgery less likely. And that’s because it wouldn’t. Johnson’s daughter was covered under Johnson’s health-care insurance. Johnson’s health-care insurance was provided by Johnson’s employer, a plastics manufacturer based in Oshkosh, Wis. There is nothing in the law that would’ve made the insurance offered by Johnson’s employer less generous or would dictate what treatments can and cannot be covered. The story about his daughter is, in all respects save for one, a complete red herring.
I am shocked, just shocked that a Wall Street Journal op-ed has nothing to do with the facts. And Ron Johnson is an Ayn Rand loon, read
this George Will column on him:
What Samuel Johnson said of Milton's "Paradise Lost" -- "None ever wished it longer than it is" -- some readers have said of "Atlas Shrugged." Not Johnson, who thinks it is "too short" at 1,088 pages.
That book is about 600 pages too long. Also, this:
"The most basic right," Johnson says, "is the right to keep your property." Remembering the golden age when, thanks to Ronald Reagan, the top income tax rate was 28 percent, Johnson says: "For a brief moment we were 72 percent free." Johnson's daughter -- now a nurse in neonatal intensive care -- was born with a serious heart defect. The operations "when her heart was only the size of a small plum" made him passionate about protecting the incentives that bring forth excellent physicians.
That 28% top marginal rate lasted for a
whole 2 years, because the deficits were huge. George H.W. Bush had to man up and raise taxes. Dude needs to quit reading libertarian science fiction and come join the real world.
The Ohio budget is going to cut tens of millions out of CCHMC's budget. We are going to hemorage money for every child who is on Medicaid/Medicare. Ron Johnson's daughter had insurance and was he was financially distroyed by her surgery. I wonder if his daughter (now a health care professional) agrees with her father's desire to keep the best medical practices in a small number of hands.
ReplyDeleteCountries with socialist medicine have better health care than the United States, and they pay half as much for it. Ron Johnson should remove his head from private insuance's ass and grow up. The idea that the US is the best medical system available is completely unfounded and unsupported by any data. Excellent and dedicated physicians are all over the world, not just in the US.
I don't think Ron Johnson's head will be extracted from private insurance's ass anytime soon. If it is, it will be immediately inserted in some other business interest's ass.
ReplyDelete