BiasBreakdown

The lie of comprehensive solutions like Obamacare

If there weren’t an accompanying video, it wouldn’t be shocking to find out that Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent at CNN.com, is not a real person but instead a software program that churns out subtly biased “news” stories sympathetic to liberal causes. Whatever the case, Ms. Cohen uses a familiar premise: find a family that has been helped by Democrat legislation, explain how heartless Republicans overturning that law would negatively affect said family, get your readers reaching for their tissues boxes. Anecdotal Bias 101:

When health care reform passed Congress more than two years ago, Julie Walters yelled for her husband to come into the living room where she was watching the vote live on television.

“I was so happy,” Walters remembers. “I yelled for Matt. I said, ‘Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?'”

The historic vote meant their 18-month-old daughter, Violet McManus, would be able to keep her health insurance. Without health care reform, she would have gotten kicked off her parents’ insurance, perhaps as early as her 5th birthday, because her care is so expensive.

I was like, Violet’s covered now!” Walters remembers. “We’re okay. We can breathe.”

But now Violet’s parents are worried they won’t be able to breathe easily again.

This week, the Supreme Court is hearing a debate on health care reform. The court could keep the reform intact, repeal parts of it, or get rid of the law altogether.

Truly a sad story, and one that CNN is all too happy to exploit in order to gain favor for Obamacare. But here’s the problem… the story actually does the exact opposite, and instead exposes the lie that Obamacare is about anything more than government control and the Democratic party’s own moral self-aggrandizement. Why is that? Let’s continue:

Violet has been hospitalized about six times and each hospitalization cost more than $50,000.

She’s now on two drugs to control the seizures and carries oxygen with her wherever she goes because she stops breathing when she has her seizures. She needs speech therapy and frequent doctor’s visits.

Matt McManus, Violet’s father, gets health insurance through his work as a video game designer. Before health care reform, there was a $5 million lifetime limit on Violet’s insurance policy. Violet is now 3 and her parents calculate she could hit that cap by her 5th birthday, and almost certainly by her 10th.

Health care reform made lifetime limits illegal…”

And so it did. But that’s not all it did. Obamacare also mandates insurance purchases, slashes Medicare, and grants boundless power to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to define what constitutes acceptable health insurance in America. And that’s the point. Comprehensive solutions like Obamacare leverage true problems to push through other, unnecessary government intrusions. Why does poor Violet have to be held hostage to special interests like Georgetown law students who don’t want to pay for their own birth control? Why can’t desperate situations like her family’s be sensibly addressed on their own merits, instead of as just another item in liberals’ all-you-can-eat health care buffet?

“If Violet does lose her current insurance, her parents know there’s no way another insurance company will want to insure her because her care is so expensive.

“They’d be crazy to want to insure her,” Walters says. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to insure her if I was an insurance company.”

For example, 2.5 million young Americans get to stay on their parents’ insurance until their 26th birthday because of health care reform, according to the Obama administration.

Seniors and people with disabilities have saved $3.2 billion on prescription drugs because of health care reform and insurance companies and 45 million women have received free mammograms and pap smears because of health care reform.

As McManus puts it, “I think people just sort of need to change their mindset about health care.”