This morning’s top story at Memeorandum is Right Wing Launches Baseless Against 12 Year Old Recipient of SCHIP”, claiming that the kid’s been “swiftboated”, to which Macsmind replies Left Wing (George Soros) website defends RICHY RICH Family with BASELESS Defense.
Here is the situation: In present-day America health insurance is tied to employment. Mr. and Mrs. Frost have chosen not to seek employment in a large company that would provide health insurance (which is never “free”) to their family. That is their prerogative.
However, they do have substantial assets, and nowadays thousands of self-employed people with less assets than the Frosts do pay directly for their own health insurance. Again, Macsmind,
I have a wife who has survived cancer (twice) and has ongoing medical conditions. I make 40,000 a year and struggle to pay insurance but pay I do. I won’t even get into the outstanding medical bills. I don’t drive a fancy car or have a hope in prayer of buying a house such as theirs. Nevertheless, the Frosts have made crappy financial decisions and are wrong to expect the government to bail them out.
The Dems are complaining that the “Right Wing” is picking on an innocent twelve year old.
Well, who decided to exploit the twelve year old in the first place? Mark Steyn points out,
Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you’re welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.
But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy’s private school, his family home, his father’s commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality – and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement,
If the family income is as reported they were already eligible for S-Chip in Maryland. The irony however is that at the end of the day this young man received hundreds of thousands of dollars of care at someone’s expense because he needed it, whether he had private insurance or public assistance. It would seem the real beneficiary here would be the hospital and doctors who weren’t paid for his care rather than the young man whose parents wouldn’t or couldn’t pay for private insurance and didn’t bother to apply for S-Chip in Maryland or didn’t know they could. Either way this bill is not the answer to this young man’s alleged problem.
Let’s make clear that every issue – be it on entitlements or whatever else – that is debated “for the children” should be debated fully and clearly. The moment anyone presents a “for the children” argument, you know that a full and clear debate is exactly what they are trying to avoid.
Update: Policy or pathos?
