{"id":5241,"date":"2017-05-03T19:40:58","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T00:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5241"},"modified":"2017-05-03T19:49:15","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T00:49:15","slug":"straw-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5241","title":{"rendered":"Straw Mom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Details of His Son\u2019s Birth &amp; Heart Disease\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MmWWoMcGmo0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Jimmy Kimmel&#8217;s monologue about his son&#8217;s congenital heart defect and the medical treatment it needed was pretty moving.\u00c2\u00a0 And Kimmel then followed it with an observation that too many folks without insurance coverage would not have had the medical access he had. It was, ultimately, a personal story about why the Affordable Care Act is so important.<\/p>\n<p>Enter Michelle Malkin for some pushback.\u00c2\u00a0 She titled her piece, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/447295\/jimmy-kimmel-monologue-child-health-care-oversimplified\">A Thinking Mom&#8217;s Message for Jimmy Kimmel.<\/a>&#8220;\u00c2\u00a0 First, she took issue with the fact that Kimmel <strong>&#8220;turned his personal plight into a political weapon&#8221;<\/strong> that so many were willing to re-tweet and like on social media.\u00c2\u00a0 But then the argument, and not the opportunisim, gets some critical attention:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Kimmel doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need more maudlin Twitter suck-uppery. He needs a healthy fact-check. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Before 2014,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he claimed, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition, you were born with a pre-existing condition.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">This is false. <strong>If parents had health insurance, the child would have been covered under the parents\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 policy whether or not the child had a health problem<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div>But this is a pretty uncharitable interpretation of Kimmel&#8217;s sentence.\u00c2\u00a0 Surely Kimmel&#8217;s not saying that without the ACA <em>the babies<\/em> would need to have insurance coverage, but the baby&#8217;s <em>parents.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 But the second issue is not addressed at all &#8211; the point about pre-existing conditions.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, if the parents have coverage, no problem.\u00c2\u00a0 But the parents can&#8217;t apply for coverage <em>after<\/em> finding the condition without either huge penalties, going into a high-risk pool with sky-high premiums, or just not getting coverage.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s what Kimmel is focusing on.\u00c2\u00a0 And that&#8217;s not at all what Malkin&#8217;s responding to.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>This occasions an important theoretical point.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes the straw man is constructed not in the <em>restatement or the explicit representation<\/em> of the opponent&#8217;s view, but in the <em>implicature<\/em> in how one responds to the things they said.\u00c2\u00a0 So when Malkin makes the unnecessarily persnickety point about parents, she&#8217;s painting a picture of Kimmel&#8217;s view by only stating the correction.\u00c2\u00a0 And when she makes the point about health insurance already on the books, she obscures Kimmel&#8217;s main point by attacking something off stage.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jimmy Kimmel&#8217;s monologue about his son&#8217;s congenital heart defect and the medical treatment it needed was pretty moving.\u00c2\u00a0 And Kimmel then followed it with an observation that too many folks without insurance coverage would not have had the medical access he had. It was, ultimately, a personal story about why the Affordable Care Act is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5241\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Straw Mom<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1786,768,1767,1964],"class_list":["post-5241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-straw-man","tag-affordable-care-act","tag-michelle-malkin","tag-obamacare","tag-straw-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5241"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5246,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5241\/revisions\/5246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}