Thursday September 22, 2011

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT THEY'RE ALL THINKING. Remember the GOP Tea Party debate, when Wolf Blitzer asked if a guy should be allowed to die of his illness if he doesn't have health insurance and a bunch of the distinguished yahoos in the audience bellowed in the affirmative? Most conservative chatterboxes have wisely kept them mouths shut about it.

So give some credit at least to John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who has stepped up and blown their cover with an article called "I Agree With the People Who Yelled 'Yes,' We Should Let Him Die at the Debate." He doesn't appear to be kidding.

First of all, as per usual when dealing with the Left, the actual question here is regularly being taken out of context. In Blitzer’s question, he wasn’t referring to someone who couldn’t afford insurance. He was talking about someone who had the money and just decided to spend it elsewhere.

So it's like the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Surely you remember the ending, when the Grasshopper was slowly strangled the death by his diseased lungs?

Aside from the justice of allowing the sick and imprudent to die, Hawkins has an actuarial (if not actual) angle, too:

If we tell people, “Whether you buy health insurance or whether you don’t, we’ll still treat you and then, if you get too far in over your head with the bills, we’ll let you declare bankruptcy” — well then, millions of people will do just that.

It probably never occurred to Hawkins that the free rider problem is directly addressed in the Affordable Care Act, so that we can provide care to the needful without putting an undue burden on society (and in that regard it's already starting to work). In fact, that's a big part of the reason why we have the ACA in the first place.

But that's beside the point, isn't it? The real point is, why would anyone take seriously a guy who writes a column called "I Agree With the People Who Yelled 'Yes,' We Should Let Him Die at the Debate" and isn't going for Swiftian irony, but either a.) actually thinks we should let sick people die because they don't have the money or b.) just wants us to think he feels that way because he thinks it's butch or something? Behold John Hawkins' vision of America:

At some point, churches, foundations, or wealthy Americans would probably step in to provide clinics to try to give those people SOME help, but there would be people who fall through the cracks. That’s the downside of having a truly free society. However, the alternative of having an all-powerful government that tries to control every aspect of our lives to make sure we all “do the right thing” is much worse.

Usually people who take the freedom-isn't-free angle are talking about soldiers who die in wars to defend it; Hawkins thinks freedom requires that we leave some people to die because they crapped out at the health insurance casino, and if we healed them it might discourage others from putting their money down.

This man is on the blogroll of Ole Perfesser Instapundit and a member in good standing of the rightblogger top tier. I wouldn't bother calling for "decent" members of this lunatic's movement to denounce him, though -- not because that's an ancient, obnoxious rightwing trick and they can have it, but because I have no reason to believe the rest of them feel any differently.