If you've spent any time following the critics of health care reform, you'd know that there's been some perfectly rational concerns over matters like structural deficits. Of course, you'd also know that there's some pretty insane talk about how health care reform will just straight up kill you, with government star chambers meeting in judgment, dispensing fatal verdicts in the form of death panels. Via Think Progress comes the news that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has evaluated the public option along the same lines, saying that it "may cost you your life."
Naturally, Mitch McConnell has no explanation for how making the consumer choice to receive health care coverage through the public option -- when no other means are available -- will end in death. Though he should know something about fatal consumer choices! After all, the Kentucky Republican has, over the course of his political career, taken $419,025 from the tobacco industry, which makes products that kill a lot of people and create preexisting conditions that disqualify many from private insurance options. McConnell basically thinks that the public option feels like "European style" health care, which Europeans like, but in McConnell's estimation, is basically a terrible, ongoing holocaust.
MCCONNELL: Well, it doesn't make any difference frankly whether you opt-in or you opt-out, it's still a government plan. You know, Medicaid, the program for the poor now, states can opt-out of that, but none of them have. I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you're going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system. And those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn't fit the government regulation, you don't get the medication.
MILLER: Right.
MCCONNELL: And it may cost you your life. I mean, we don't want to go down that path.
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And yes, the person deployed to sagely assess the validity of McConnell's claims in this instance is Dennis Miller, a famous comedian who nearly destroyed Monday Night Football, with his thesaurus.
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