Over the weekend, radio personality Rush Limbaugh (on vacation in Hawaii) went to the hospital with chest pains. Believe it or not, I am glad he's okay (yes, really). Even though I detest the man and the way he earns a living, I'm not going to wish pain or death on anyone.
The problem, for me, came with Limbaugh's post-hospitalization press conference, where he declared that his treatment convinced him that "there's not one thing wrong" with American health care - the implication being that current health care reform efforts are needless. Well, no sh*t, Sherlock. The health care system works quite well for a gazillionaire who, by his own admission, happened to be in close proximity to a high-quality hospital at the time his chest pains hit.
But most of us aren't gazillionaires like Limbaugh. To my knowledge, no one has claimed that there are widescale problems with the quality of medical care in this country. The issue is access to that care, which most of us have only at great cost, or not at all.
Either Limbaugh is cynically spin-doctoring his own rarified experience to undermine the case for reform, or he's genuinely clueless about the true cost-based health care rationing that's already happening all over America. (According to one study, bankruptcies due to medical bills affect 2 million Americans each year.)
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