The healthcare debate gets a bit more sucky every day...

[boudiceaborn]

In a recent editorial (objectively titled 'How the House Runs Over Grandma') the Investor's Business Daily states that:

"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

Um. Oh. Hai.

Comments

[eyelid]

they've "corrected" it now, if by "corrected" you mean "took it out like it wasn't ever there, with no sign of shame."

[boudiceaborn]

Seems to be up again and "corrected" (in that they apologise for 'implying that Professor Hawking does not live in the UK' rather than conceding the point that the UK does not exterminate ALS patients).

[crazy_go_nuts]

It's so strange how angry people get over this. It's very emotional. Yet when I look back at people who opposed busing to end segregated schools, and a host of other progressive topics in the 1960s and 1970s, it seems like it was a lot of the same emotion. Lower middle class people, feel like they've worked for everything they've got (whether that's true or not), then feel like the government, lead by liberals, is going to swoop in and ruin it all. They just want to be left alone and stop being told their ideas are out of fashion, logically unsound, or even bigoted and racist. But at the same time, they feel their world is crumbling even without socialized healthcare, yet somehow it's just the next step in the grand liberal scheme to screw everything up

[boudiceaborn]

You make a good point. At first I thought it was the 'life or death' nature of the debate. It's very easy to scare people when the potential fallout is "you will die earlier because they will say you aren't worth saving" rather than "black people will go to your child's school." Except that, of course, the violence and anger and fear were much stronger surrounding desegregation than the current town halls.

[levaniel]

...Perhaps it's because Hawking's voice simulator doesn't have a British accent. That's the only semi-plausible explanation I can come up with. "Well, he doesn't *sound* British, so he can't *be* British."

On the other hand, I would have thought that people who knew that Stephen Hawking existed would know a bit about him.

[boudiceaborn]

Haha, perhaps that's it!

He could just as easily been Canadian even if that was his real accent...and that wouldn't have proved their point either!