As we approach the 2012 elections, the mainstream media is sharpening its hatchets to defend their candidate Barack. The Boston Globe exhibited a sample hatchet job on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on its front page, titled "Amid strained clinics, foe assails ‘ObamaCare.'" The story-- less a news story than an unpaid political ad for Obama and ObamaCare -- portrays Barbour as heartless and "out of touch with low-income people." Here are the opening paragraphs:
The plight of health care's have-nots is vividly illustrated alongside a highway on the outskirts of Yazoo City, the hometown of Mississippi governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Haley Barbour.
Tucked into a crumbling strip mall with a dollar store called Dirt Cheap, a bare-bones clinic with a peeling facade serves dozens of impoverished patients daily. It is among the limited sources of primary care for about a half million residents who lack insurance in Mississippi, 18 percent of the population.
The prose drips with sentimentality for the "plight" of those who have to go to -- eek! -- a clinic. In a strip mall. Next to the Dirt Cheap store! Horrors! Boston Globe reporters wouldn't be caught dead in a strip mall. But, the obvious question raised here: if they have a clinic, how does that make them "health care have-nots"?
Later in the article we learn that the clinic is one of many in the Jackson metropolitan area run by the Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center, a non-profit whose mission is to serve "the uninsured and under-served." I'm not from Mississippi, but it seems like a reputable organization, performing a needed service, a local solution provided with a minimum of expense and layers of bureaucracy.
My primary care physician is at one of the best hospitals in the world. In Massachusetts we have a form of guaranteed health insurance comparable to the ObamaCare that Barbour is assailing. My annual physical this year cost $1,372, and after my $15,048 annual insurance policy paid its share, my out of pocket cost was $458. My health care is excellent, but is this level of excellence a basic human right that we must guarantee to every citizen through federal mandate? Isn't a nurse practitioner or a doctor in a strip mall clinic capable of handling most primary care medicine -- our multitude of aches, pains, coughs, and sore throats?
Haley Barbour thinks so, and he has led the lawsuit by twenty-six states against ObamaCare. He refuses to accept federal funding because of the costly strings attached. The Globe writer seems confused by the whole concept. As he writes, "health care advocates and physicians...are especially dismayed because they view the law as a great financial deal for the state."
Barbour responds:
Most of the health disparities in Mississippi are not because of the inability to get access or afford health care...They are because of diet, alcohol, because of drugs, the very high incidence of illegitimacy that leads to high incidence of low-birth weight children. I grew up in a society where if it wasn't fried you were asking, "Why not?"
Imagine, a Presidential candidate refusing federal money and preaching individual responsibility. I like the guy, despite the Globe's efforts.
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