Not the Onion, part 342

Thighmaster General

While Scott and Rob argue their minds to the bone on the place of rationality in political discourse, the Wall Street Journal publishes an error-filled op-ed (in a section called “The Experts”) by Suzanne Somers, of Three’s Company and Thighmaster fame.  Here’s how it begins:

First of all, let’s call affordable health care what it really is: It’s socialized medicine.

I’ve had an opportunity to watch the Canadian version of affordable health care in action with all its limitations with my Canadian husband’s family. A few years ago, I was startled to see the cover of Maclean’s, a national Canadian magazine, showing a picture of a dog on an examining table with the headline, “Your Dog Can Get Better Health Care Than You.” It went on to say that young Canadian medical students have no incentive to become doctors to humans because they can’t make any money. Instead, there is a great surge of Canadian students becoming veterinarians. That’s where the money is. A Canadian animal can have timely MRIs, surgeries and any number of tests it needs to receive quality health care.

So the reason the Affordable Care Act, i.e., Obamacare, is a failure, is because the Canadian system, to which ACA is completely unrelated, is also a failure, according to the cover of a Canadian magazine (the original version of Somer’s op-ed said it was a horse, not a dog).

This would be hilarious if it were not the Wall Street Journal.

As always, the Onion already kind of called it.

3 thoughts on “Not the Onion, part 342”

  1. So… do you suppose she wrote the editorial herself then approached the WSJ with it? That she was approached by the WSJ editorial board, “You have a Canadian husband, right? How about writing an editorial about Canada’s Medicare system?” Or what? There’s a value to the WSJ in using a celebrity non-expert, in that the person can ramble incoherently and illogically about whatever she wants without their being accused of misrepresenting her knowledge or credentials, but (unless you read it) you would think even the WSJ would have some rudimentary standards for its editorial page. I guess it has some standards, as it clipped out a couple of fake quotes Sommers apparently gleaned from right-wing websites, even if the rest of the editorial is scarcely better.

    Statements like “” make no sense in a vacuum. I had somebody complaining in my forum that her insurance company (U.S.) would not pay for IVF because of her age. Their actual reason was a low probability of success, but the statistic was derived from her age. Ah, the perils of socialized medicine. My guess is that a frail, elderly person with some form of organ failure was denied a transplant because she had almost no chance of surviving the surgery, and in the absence of a transplant the best approach to treatment was palliative care. But Sommers would have to tell us, and were she to tell the truth she would completely undermine her story because the same thing happens here.

    As for Canadian would-be doctors becoming vets… that is, other than the ones in her husband’s family… funny, then, isn’t it that the average Canadian sees a doctor more frequently than the average American. Clearly not every doctor is moving to the U.S. in order to maximize his income.

    She doesn’t even know that the PPACA doesn’t relate to retirees, people who eligible for the U.S. socialized medicine program called “Medicare” but instead only requires that people of working age obtain insurance from a private health insurance company. She doesn’t understand that Medicare already covers pre-existing conditions. “[I]t doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize”… yeah, but it still takes more than she has to offer.

    “And all I gotta do is… act naturally.”

  2. Clarifiction: Statements like “My 75-year-old Canadian girlfriend was denied treatment because she was too old” make no sense in a vacuum. It’s true as well of statements like “”, but for a different reason. 😉

  3. I was going to ask you about that. Your first question is an interesting one. Hard to imagine what’s going on in the heads of people who think up and publish this kind of garbage.

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