Fox News host Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery advocated for the Graham-Cassidy Trumpcare plan by arguing that health insurance is not needed for very sick children like Jimmy Kimmel’s because there are charity hospitals and doctors who do pro bono work.
In a discussion promoting Graham-Cassidy on Fox's The Five last night, Kennedy ironically started out by arguing that it’s “incredibly cruel to say that Obamacare is working” because in some places premiums have skyrocketed. She didn’t mention that Marco Rubio’s sabotage is largely responsible.
Kennedy went on to advocate that young, healthy people should be allowed to go without decent health insurance. That, of course, is really a way of saying that she doesn’t care if young people have access to good health care, covered up with a pretense of empathy.
KENNEDY: Forcing you to pay for insurance that you don’t need, that’s not working. There are young people in this country, young healthy people in this country who only want catastrophic insurance. They can’t get that under Obamacare. So they would rather pull out of the system entirely and that causes a great destabilization and pay the penalty and just go uninsured.
Again no mention of the destabilization foisted on the system by Rubio.
Later, cohost Jesse Watters played some of Jimmy Kimmel’s on-air criticisms of the bill, based on the very serious health problems of his infant son. “You think Kimmel’s being helpful to the debate?” Watters “asked.” [Kimmel’s later response to the criticism of him from Cassidy and Fox News is must-see TV!]
Cohost Dana Perino said that moving stories like that of Kimmel’s son are compelling but “not the best way to make public policy, writ large.”
She argued that Sen. Bill Cassidy, one of the co-authors of Graham-Cassidy, should know better than Kimmel because Cassidy is a doctor who “spent years working in charity hospitals. This is not somebody who is just basically ... a get-rich-quick kind of doctor.”
Then how does Perino explain the fact that so many coalitions of health professionals, such as the American Medical Association, as well as the health insurance industry are vehemently against the bill? Nobody asked.
But that reminded Kennedy that going without health insurance is no biggie as far as she’s concerned:
KENNEDY: You bring up a really good point and that’s charity hospitals. And that’s something that we don’t talk about because some of the very best care in this country comes from places like Shriners and St. Jude’s and, you know, the various children’s hospitals across the country.
[…] And if you talk to people who have done surgical residencies, they will tell you they work in county hospitals and there are so many surgeons who do a lot of pro bono work. And those are some of the most challenging cases where they actually learn the most. Any child who goes to the hospital who has a life-threatening heart condition, who needs surgery, is not going to be turned away.
PERINO: That’s true.
[…]
KENNEDY: One of my very best friends is the head of pediatric cardio-thoracic surgery in Arkansas and what he does in taking those lives and those tiny hearts into his hands, it takes so much dedication and hard work and guts and grace and a solul and those are the human beings who would never turn away the kind of people that Jimmy Kimmel is talking about.
And even though Perino had just said that personal stories are not good foundations for policy, she told a story about one of her friends, insured under Obamacare, who could not find a doctor in Manhattan who would take his insurance for an MRI.
In other words, you can’t count on a doctor doing pro bono work for every medical need. It was a point that Kennedy and Perino who, undoubtedly, have generous health insurance plans, seemed to miss.
With no due respect, Kennedy, until you actually use charity as your own family's source of health insurance, just STFU.
See why I say that below, from the September 20, 2017 The Five.
