Mike Huckabee: Under Obama Care, Ted Kennedy Would Have Had To “Take Pain Pills And Die”
Cue several weeks of outrageously outraged carping about the politicizing of the “liberal lion’s” death, etc, etc. But while the liberals, desperate to get out from under the losing streak they’ve had on health care, try to make the debate about the nature of the debate it’s worth noting that Huckabee isn’t wrong.
It’s a little funny to hear this coming from a southern-fried populist like Huckabee, who at one time was advocating for a national smoking ban, but even so. He’s not wrong.
I posted a week ago about a Politico article which pointed out that even as the then-still-alive Kennedy called for all Americans to have access to the same level of health care as Senators he was pursuing the exact sort of aggressive treatment for his own cancer that the federal government would have to ration, if not outright block, access to in order bring health care costs down.
If every American with a brain tumor, or some other sort of cancer, were given the same level of access to aggressive (and marginally successful) treatments that Ted Kennedy got our health care costs would spiral out of control. We’d never, ever be able to afford it as a nation. As a nation, we’d have to ration access to that sort of care.
But it would still be available to people who could afford to buy themselves care above and beyond the government system. People like, say, Ted Kennedy.
The proponents of government health care can get as outrageously outraged as they want when people bring up the grim specter of limiting access to care and essentially putting sick seniors out to pasture, but there is no way for government to run health care without doing that. Tags: Asshats, Domestic Issues, Politics
