Update: Hillary Clinton, She Whose Hand Rocks The Cradle, warns S-CHIP critics to “lay off.” Or else what, Mrs. Clinton?
“I don’t mind them picking on me; they’ve done it for years,” Clinton said to laughter from the audience at Symphony Hall in Boston. “You know, I think I’ve proven I can take care of myself against all of them.
“But President Bush and the Republicans should lay off Graeme Frost and all the other children who are getting health care because we have decided to do the right thing in America,” Clinton said.
Hillary should lay off the kiddie shields. Last time she exploited a sick child to argue for universal health care, it didn’t turn out so well.
And what part of “According to the states’ budget projections, 13 will spend more than 44 percent of their SCHIP funds in 2008 on people who are neither children nor pregnant women” doesn’t Hillary understand?
***
The Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein in repose
On behalf of all liberal bloggers of purported good faith, the Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein has chivalrously stepped up to the plate to challenge me to a debate about S-CHIP.
I’m. Trrrrembling.
With. Laughter.
A good-faith debate would require that Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein actually be a person of good faith. He is treated as such in some elite conservative circles, where his work is linked frequently and intellectual repartee among the Beltway boys’ club is warm and chummy. He is free to continue traveling in those cozy circles where highbrow right-wingers are not so mean and scary.
But I’d just as soon share a stage, physical or virtual, with Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein as I would with Chris Matthews, Geraldo Rivera, or an overflowing vat of liquid radioactive waste.
First, let’s bust the cherished myth that Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein is as brilliant as he, the nutroots, and his respectable conservative friends think he is.
He is proudly touting the discovery of a blog post I wrote about my experience with Maryland’s individual health insurance market in 2004. He excerpts this part:
I have commented before on the problems with central planning in health care. I certainly am not convinced that a government-run system is the answer, but I do agree with Krugman that there are serious problems with our health insurance system, particularly in the market for individually-purchased (non-group) coverage.
After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that “choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.
We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage–a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.
With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.
What he fails to excerpt is the rest of the post:
In the end, we decided to purchase a very high-deductible plan (sold by Golden Rule Insurance Co.) coupled with a tax-sheltered Medical Savings Account (MSA). We couldn’t qualify for the preferred rate because Golden Rule says I am underweight. Hmph! In any case, while Krugman and most Democrats don’t seem to like MSAs, in our case we were glad they were an option.
Update: The Times reports that the proportion of Americans without health insurance is on the rise. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, says the proportion has remained steady. (Both are right; it depends on which timeframe one is talking about.) The WSJ editorial writers suggest:
States like New York could do a lot for [those who cannot obtain health insurance] merely by getting rid of the state insurance regulations that make a basic policy roughly 10 times more expensive than it is in neighboring Connecticut. Better still, Congress could save poor New Yorkers from the tyranny of Albany by putting an end to our Balkanized and anachronistic 50-state insurance market and simply decreeing that there shall be nationwide commerce in health insurance. They could then buy policies issued in saner states or over the Internet.
Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein and his Pavlovian (Yet Respectable) boosters are treating my 2004 post as proof-positive of my utterly flabbergasting HYPOCRISY!
Look! The wingnut complained about the health insurance market! Ergo, she is a HYYYYPPPPOCRITE. And stupid! And a Nazi bitch!
Continue flinging your peas. I do have a spit shield now.
Grown-ups, on the other hand, will be able to grasp effortlessly that if I had decided not to buy private insurance and then demanded that the government cover my medical expenses and insure me after a catastrophic accident, then, yes, why, yes, you could flap two HYPOCRISY! cards up and down in each hand until your feet lifted off the ground.
In fact, I advocated MSAs and noted approvingly the Wall Street Journal’s suggestion that the cure for limited market choices was less government intervention. Not more.
This is perfectly consistent, in other words, with my INHUMAN, FASCIST, CAPITALIST, WINGNUT views.
Is it Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein’s view that only commentators and analysts who adore the current state of the market are allowed to criticize S-CHIP’s mission creep? If anything, health care entitlement growth will make the problems I wrote about three years ago worse–problems due in significant part to the government regulations the WSJ spotlighted. Herd more people into government-subsidized health care and the private (unsubsidized) individual market will become even more dysfunctional.
True to form, however, other Respectable Liberal Bloggers are mindlessly promoting Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein’s discovery of my observations as the Holy Grail of Hypocrisy Cards–and falsely characterizing my post to boot. Respectable Liberal Blogger Jonathan Cohn at TNR’s The Plank claims that “I couldn’t find health insurance” and that “there was no affordable coverage to be had.”
Reading comprehension grade: F.
Nutroots pandering grade: A+ with an unhinged smiley face!
RLB Cohn thinks he has another trump card in noting that “[i]t’s the insurers who sell individual and small business coverage that screen carefully for pre-existing medical conditions, raising premiums or denying coverage for those whom they deem high medical risks.” Other left-wing blogs have zeroed in on the Frosts’ reported inability to obtain affordable insurance after their car accident.
Well, yes, it sucks. But Earth to liberals: That’s how insurance works–if you don’t buy it before you need it, you shouldn’t be shocked if it’s impossible to get after you need it.
Yet, somehow, I’m the HYPOCRITE for acting responsibly by considering alternative health insurance plans before anyone in my family required catastrophic care. As I wrote in my post, I wasn’t too happy about the choices at the time, especially the most expensive plans, but instead of expecting Big Nanny and American taxpayers to be our insurer, we made the decision to shell out for an inexpensive, high-deductible plan. (Yes, such plans do exist.)
Most noxious is the continued sanctimony of left-wing bloggers positioning themselves as champions of the children of working-poor in their embrace of S-CHIP expansion. Notice how they say nothing about the entitlement creep that has this working-poor children’s health insurance program covering a growing number of adults. I repeat:
According to the states’ budget projections, 13 will spend more than 44 percent of their SCHIP funds in 2008 on people who are neither children nor pregnant women.
Michigan tops the list with 71.6 percent of its SCHIP money earmarked for adults who have no kids. In New Mexico, 52.3 percent of the state’s SCHIP dollars will be spent on childless adults.
Source: HHS/CMS
Large numbers of these adults, also growing in number, are by no sane definition “working poor.” As Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog points out:
In California…it appears that there’s nothing stopping a trust fund baby, if their ONLY income comes from investment returns (i.e., it’s “unearned”), from qualifying for SCHIP! Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie could sit at home and stop boring us with their TV show, appearances, and commercials, have babies by any number of entourage members, and join in the SCHIP party. Is this a great country or what?
Seriously folks, 46 states and the District of Columbia (HT Democracy Project) do not have an asset test for SCHIP. It seems likely that they, like California, as Kesler has just shown, don’t include “unearned” income either. Such laxity in regards to assets and “unearned” income may also be present in some or all of these states’ much larger Medicaid programs.
This is nuts.
Meanwhile, RLB Cohn piles on with another complaint about us savage right-wingers. I missed his e-mail in the deluge of moonbat mail that’s currently overwhelming my inbox. He wanted to know if I had tried to contact the Frosts. Here’s your answer: The reason I went to the Frosts’ commercial property was to try and interview Halsey Frost. He wasn’t there, which is why I ended up talking to one of his two tenants, who was happy to share his views. In fact, he noted that two other media outlets had stopped by. He was happy to talk to them, too. So much for my “grilling” and “harassment” of the Frosts’ friends. Out of respect for the family, contrary to this mythic image being conjured up of me pulling a Code Pink-style stunt at their home, I did not go onto their private property uninvited. I simply drove by their house, on a public street, and reported what I saw.
Can you imagine if I had gone on their property? Knocked on their door? Or called them up?
If you’re a conservative blogger and you don’t call them, then you aren’t getting their side of the story. If you do call them, you’re guilty of harassing them.
If, on the other hand, you’re an MSM reporter who asks only softball questions and snaps photos of the couple at their doorstep, you’re a Respectable Journalist.
As I’ve said before, you can’t win with these people.
“Debate” Ezra Klein? What a perverse distraction and a laughable waste of time that would be. And that’s what they really want, isn’t it? To distract and waste time so they can foist their agenda on the country unimpeded.
Last point: Let’s take the costume off, Mr. Klein, shall we? More than a year ago, I informed Respectable Liberal Blogger Ezra Klein that he had printed false, libelous claims about my run-in with the thugs at UC Santa Cruz. He refused to retract them and continues to intentionally spread that false, libelous information–weaving it, in fact, into one of his latest diatribes:
Something has gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin’s cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they’ve spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game — he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home, insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud, make threatening phone calls to the family, interrogate the neighbors as to the family’s character and financial state.
This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.
The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics. It is beyond politics. It was done to Scott Beauchamp, a soldier serving in Iraq. It was done to college students from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Currently, it is being done to a child and his family. And think of those targets: College students, soldiers, children. It can be done to absolutely anyone.
This is not politics. This is, in symbolism and emotion, a violent group ritual. It is savages tearing at the body of a captured enemy. It is the group reminding itself that the Other is always disingenuous, always evil, always lying, always pitiful and pathetic and grotesque. It is a bonding experience — the collaborative nature of these hateful orgies proves that much — in which the enemy is exposed as base and vile and then ripped apart by the community. In that way, it sustains itself, each attack preemptively justifying the next vicious assault, justifying the whole hateful edifice on which their politics rest.
It is a blessing and relief that these mobs, as of yet, do nothing more than smear, that the blood they exult in is figurative and the inflicted harm is emotional or occupational. But they are howling, braying, thirsty mobs nonetheless, and their frequent, communal savagings of chosen representatives of their enemies is ugly and unsettling. It’s impossible not to wonder when the first one will drive by a house, and then decide to ring the doorbell, and then. Indeed, it’s already come damn close.
Christy Hardin Smith, has more, as does Digby. Think Progress has the facts of the story. And it’s worth following some of the links, including the one to Malkin’s attack on college students from years past. Malkin is, last I looked, the highest traffic rightwing blogger. What she’s channeling is real, and it should repulse and worry decent people, no matter their political orientation.
Good faith, eh? What would Ezra Klein know about it?
Now, run along and thump your chest over your “victory” at BloggingHeadsTV or something.
I have to get back to work. You know, “stalking.” “Assault.” “Savagings.” “Howling. “Braying.” “Hateful orgies.”
That stuff.
***
Previous:
Democrat poster-child abuse, the nutroots’ pushback, and the continued campaign to silence the Right
Video flashback: John Kerry’s health care poster child abuse
Graeme Frost and the perils of Democrat poster child abuse Updated
"The pathological dishonesty of these people never ceases to amaze me."
Flinging Their What? [Dan Collins]
Rick Moran at American Thinker gets the SCHIP expansion debate right, but reveals a silly typo on Michelle Malkin’s part.
McQ at Q&O gets it right, too.
Fausta summarizes what a lot of the commenters here were saying yesterday:
Let’s make clear that every issue - be it on entitlements or whatever else - that is debated “for the children” should be debated fully and clearly. The moment anyone presents a “for the children” argument, you know that a full and clear debate is exactly what they are trying to avoid.
“And Tiny Tim did get better, thanks to SCHIP expansion. And people said that if ever a woman kept the spirit of Christmas, without all the religious baggage, it was Nancy Pelosi, for whom Christmas was every day of the year.”
AJ Strata, champion of political expediency, gets it wrong, I think, by believing that lots of people are affected by the blogospheric fireworks. On the contrary, I believe that it is necessary to fight the left’s attempts to impose their taboos in this fashion.
Expanding the Program [Dan Collins]
The Baltimore Sun publishes some hard numbers:
The Frosts say the description of their family’s circumstances now circulating is misleading. Halsey, they say, is a self-employed woodworker - he has no employees - while Bonnie works part time for a medical publishing firm. Together, they say, they earn between $45,000 and $50,000 a year.
That would make the Frosts eligible for Maryland’s Children’s Health Program, which is open to families that earn no more than 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or $82,830 a year for a family of six.
The Frosts declined to show The Sun their 2006 income tax returns, and the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene would not confirm their enrollment in the program. But John G. Folkemer, the deputy secretary for health care financing, said yesterday that applicants must prove their income levels through Social Security numbers or tax returns to be accepted for coverage.
Folkemer said a family’s assets are not considered in determining eligibility. Halsey Frost purchased the family home for $55,000 in 1990, according to city records, and refinanced in 2005, he says, to make improvements to accommodate the return of Graeme and Gemma from the hospital. The 1936 brick rowhouse, on a side street near Patterson Park, has an assessed value of $263,140.
So, up to 3 times the poverty level makes a family “working poor,” and they wish to expand the program. I don’t have any beef with the family declining to share their tax filings; that’s their prerogative. I’d say more, but I expect it will all be covered in the comments. I wonder if I could get a distance learning degree in Mental Hygiene. What do mental hygienists get paid?
Nancy Pelosi, from the same article:
Pelosi fired back yesterday.
“I think that the attack on this family is just breaking new ground and stooping to new lows in terms of what happens in Washington, D.C.,” she told reporters.
Malkin has some examples of why we are a little distrustful regarding these issues. Perhaps you all can supply me some links to help Nan get a bit of perspective on how groundbreaking this is.
More insight: Loonbats believe Republican staffers may have spread smear info, because a staffer for McConnell wrote a summary of blog reactions to the news the family might not be so poor that somehow was misdirected to Harry Reid’s office. You know, this leak may have severed his link.
Thoughts on karmic retribution and other good stuff, at the Pub, and Tinkerty-Tonk makes it sting again (but not me, this time). Maybe Malkin could outsource some of her stalking to Rachel.
Camille Paglia on lesbian bathroom sex and some other stuff I can’t recall. Lesbians are a lot like guys with breasts.
UPDATE: MayBee catches Adkins posting at Klein’s:
The cute part is how I was attacked… I said it on my blog and I’ll say it here. I wasn’t defending SCHIP, not at all, I was defending that families right to privacy. That’s why I put malkin’s real address, Phone number and Arial picture of her house on my blog. I removed it after a reporter for the Baltimore Sun asked me to kill it, because they were doing a story on Malkin.
If Malkin wants to try painting me as moonbat, fine. I’ll just paint her as the right wing fascist that she is.
Posted by: Hardliner | Oct 10, 2007 11:48:30 AM
Colin McEnroe boils down to this: It’s really cruel to expect people to plan ahead. What a noob.
Use extreme caution in rebuffing, taunting Chuck Adkins (h/t Moron Pundit)
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asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment. 
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