WSJ publishes op-ed from health care expert Suzanne Somers
The Ghost of a Flea
For your perusal: a thin film of anecdote married to a standard derp armature of fake quotes, and argument from questionable authority: Suzanne Somers: The Affordable Care Act Is a Socialist Ponzi Scheme.
My sister-in-law had to wait two months to get a General Practitioner. During this period she spent her days in bed vomiting continuously, unable to get any food or drink down because she couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor. When she finally did, the doctor said, “Oh you don’t need me, you need a specialist.” That took another two weeks until she got a pill that corrected the problem.Really, is this what we want?
Funny how every American knows somebody in a country with universal health care that had to wait for treatment, but doesn’t know someone who just plain didn’t get any healthcare in the US. The inverse proposition: what would happen to that person in the US, with no insurance, is not addressed. And, of course, implicitly, any anecdotes about the insane prices of health care without insurance aren’t invalid because reasons…fake quote by V I Lenin reasons:
In earlier version of this post contained a quotation attributed to Lenin (“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state”) that has been widely disputed. And it included a quotation attributed to Churchill (“Control your citizens’ health care and you control your citizens”) that the Journal has been unable to confirm.
But hey, who can argue with someone who’s been in proximity to doctors? Canadian doctors who moved to the US to make more money…the best kind! Because profit motive is a meaningful metric of efficacy: after all, it’s not like inelastic demand of certain goods and services can result in massive price gouging even for inferior quality.
if you can sell bottled water at a $20 a pop in a disaster area, it must be really good water.
But let’s keep our eye on the ball here. Suzanne Somers is seriously concerned, and it’s not like she directly profits from a long string of peddling snake oil in a succession of “health” books. And the WSJ is a respectable publication that wouldn’t turn over space to a quack who thinks chemo isn’t ever necessary.
Derp.
Update:
(with a nod to erik_t)
Also, a thorough and snarky analysis of Somers’ anti-cancer quackery at sciencebasedmedicine.org. It features the wonderful phrase “arrogance of ignorance” in the first paragraph and just keeps rolling.
As someone who used to subscribe to the WSJ, I’m embarassed by what the paper has become under Murdoch. I might not have agreed with the op-eds before the takeover, but there was at least a pro forma attempt at coherence.
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