QUOTE OF THE DAY…. Sharron Angle (R), the extremist Senate candidate in Nevada, thinks the pre-reform health care system works just fine.
“I think we get confused a little bit. Our healthcare system is the best in the world. There’s nothing wrong with our healthcare system. Our doctors are the best,” says Angle.
“But how many people get access to the best healthcare in the world,” asks Action News reporter Marco Villarreal.
“The access is not what is being denied. It is the cost that has become prohibitive and that’s what we need to address,” she answers.
Prefacing her comments by saying “we get confused” was probably a good idea — Angle’s assessment is the kind of thing we hear from those who don’t know very much about health care policy.
There’s a difference between the quality of our health care and the quality of our health care system. The United States has many truly extraordinary doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medical resources, and no one has argued that there’s something wrong with America’s medical professionals, our technology, our facilities, and/or our ability to treat the ill.
The point is who has access to this quality care, who can afford it, who’ll die because they lack the necessary coverage, who’ll get kicked out of the system under rescission, who’ll never get into the system because of a pre-existing condition, and whether families, businesses, and government agencies will go bankrupt trying to finance such a system.
Angle’s convinced access isn’t being denied. That’s idiotic — maybe Sharron Angle should stop by a free clinic for the uninsured sometime, and talk with struggling American families, many of them with very treatable ailments, who sometimes go years without basic medical care.
We’re talking about a system in which one layoff could mean no coverage for a family, one pre-existing condition could mean no affordable insurance, and one serious illness could send a family that played by the rules and did nothing wrong into bankruptcy. No modern system on earth allows this, except ours.
At least, that is, until President Obama, Harry Reid, and other Democratic officials brought necessary improvements to this dysfunctional mess. Sharron Angle thinks reform was not only wrong, but unnecessary.
She has no idea what she’s talking about.
