Today’s Wall Street Journal has yet another misleading op-ed about health reform. This one is by Senator Ron Johnson arguing that “ObamaCare” would have killed his daughter Carey, who was born with a serious heart defect. I feel badly for Aaron Carroll, Jon Chait, Steve Benen, Brian Beutler, Igor Volsky, and Ezra Klein, who took some of their valuable time to debunk this latest repackaging of the “death panel” hoax.
Johnson’s op-ed reminds me of my favorite self-refuting editorial of all time in the Investor’s Business Daily, which claimed:
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.
Upon attracting satisfying near-universal ridicule for this polemical own-goal mistake, IBD published a correction that was pretty funny, too. If you click on IBD’s link to the editorial, you will find that the offending paragraph is simply removed, with a note that says:
Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
Anyway, back to Senator Johnson. If health reform was so bad for infants with damaged hearts and for people with serious medical conditions who require high-tech care, you might wonder why the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and so many other advocacy groups for people with chronic illnesses celebrated one year ago today.