rssFred Barnes: Obama Wants to Kill Classically Trained Actresses!
Monday, April 20, 2009 at 3:41 pm
- 2 Comments
Fine, that’s unfair, but this is a jarring paragraph from Barnes’s editorial on how Republicans can “defeat Obamacare.”
Obama’s liberal reforms… would only be a short step to a Canadian-style, single payer system run by bureaucrats in Washington. It’s worth noting how Canadian health care failed to save the life of actress Natasha Richardson after a recent ski accident. The nearby hospital had no scanning equipment or neurosurgeon, and there was no helicopter to fly her to a trauma center. By the time she arrived at one, she was brain dead. Why wasn’t proper treatment and equipment at hand? Government had decided not to pay for them.
This is a popular argument on the right, but as far as its political effectiveness for Republicans? We’ve come a long way since the Kristol memo.
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2 Comments
Comment posted April 20, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
If that's Barnes's actual argument, he's in gross error. Ms Richardson declined intervention when first approached by ski-patrollers, despite it being urged. She declined because she felt well.
Many hours had passed before she did seek out medical aid, and her decline happened so quickly once she did arrive in hospital that it's very much an open question whether any level of immediate intervention would have made a difference.
What happened was simply a sad tragedy, not any sort of indictment of single-payer care.
Barnes is both specious and vicious to abuse the dead this way to prop up a fallacious argument.
Comment posted April 20, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
If that's Barnes's actual argument, he's in gross error. Ms Richardson declined intervention when first approached by ski-patrollers, despite it being urged. She declined because she felt well.
Many hours had passed before she did seek out medical aid, and her decline happened so quickly once she did arrive in hospital that it's very much an open question whether any level of immediate intervention would have made a difference.
What happened was simply a sad tragedy, not any sort of indictment of single-payer care.
Barnes is both specious and vicious to abuse the dead this way to prop up a fallacious argument.
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