The word on the street is that Jimmy Kimmel’s tearful story about his newborn’s heart surgery may have saved Obamacare.
“No parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child’s life. … It just shouldn’t happen. Not here.”
It’s time for overpaid comedians like Kimmel and the sycophants who are joining his effort to save the ACA take a look at the cold, hard reality of what will happen to the average family with a sick infant if we continue down this road.
Obamacare is going broke. If we allow it to continue, there won’t be an insurer who will be left in the program. We have two choices: socialized medicine or a return to the free market.
If you believe all the lies told by Kimmel and those who have jumped on his bandwagon, then socialized medicine is the only logical choice:
Let’s review those lies:
- Before 2014 and Obamacare, babies born with a health problem would not be covered by health insurance.
- Before 2014 and Obamacare, babies born with a severe problem would not be able to get expensive life-saving surgery unless their parents were super-rich like Kimmel.
On Friday, HBO’s Bill Maher jumped on this bandwagon, ripping GOP House Republicans and saying, “They told Jimmy Kimmel’s baby, ‘Go screw yourself.'”
Here are the facts:
- Before Obamacare, babies born with problems, no matter how severe, were covered under their parent’s heath insurance. Parents had 30 days to add them to their policy at which time they were charged the same premium as parents who gave birth to healthy infants.
- Even if the parents had no health insurance, the hospital was, and is, required by a 1986 law to provide this lifesaving surgery.
- If the parents were poor, the baby was covered by Medicaid.
- Even if the parents were not poor, the baby might have received free coverage through the CHIP program.
- If the parents were well-off and the child (or one of the parents) developed a severe condition that required long-term care, Medicaid would step in at some point to protect the family from high medical bills.
- If the family was affluent enough to afford health insurance but decided against it, the family would have been billed for the cost of the emergency surgery and could, in the process, go bankrupt as a result. This gave them a fresh start and, hopefully, caused them to make wiser decisions down the road.
The doctor who performed the surgery on Kimmel’s infant, Evan Zahn, went on record to correct all this misinformation, but then added some of his own:
“We invest millions of dollars in these patients, as a society, to get them to survive. … Then they survive … and they (as adults) can’t have health care.”
As the wife of a man who was born with serious congenital heart problems, I know something about this issue. Yes, it may be difficult and more expensive, but hardly impossible. Before the ACA, most states had high-risk pools. Also, there were indemnity plans that could be added onto that coverage for very specific needs like heart surgery.
Before the ACA, folks with pre-existing conditions could get coverage through their employer, groups like the National Association of the Self-Employed, or you could start your own group with as few as two people in some states.
What Kimmel and the limousine liberals who have signed on to his guilt-o-rama push to save Obamacare forget is this: The working class he wants to protect will not have access to the kind of hospital or doctor they can afford.
Yes, as a family, we did without some things in order to pay a premium for heath insurance. But, thanks to the free market, when the day came that my husband’s heart deteriorated, we were advised to immediately go to one of the very best heart surgeons in the country. We hopped on a plane, and in three days he was in the O.R. After it was over, that doctor told us that my husband’s surgery was the most difficult operation he had ever performed. I am quite certain my husband would not have survived had we been anywhere else, had to wait for an appointment or were limited by the ACA.
So before you decide you want government-run health care, take a long look at the waiting time and limited access now provided by the ACA. It will only get worse. Is that what you really want for your loved ones? That’s what’s waiting down the road if you, and your elected representatives, fall for Kimmel’s hyperbole.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
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