The President is big on socialized medicine…errrr…a form of national health care. While none of us wish anyone the pain of a truly serious illness, and while it is a fact that getting seriously ill can rack up serious bills even if you have good health insurance, there’s a small problem when the urgency of pushing one’s agenda causes facts to be left in the dust. Little facts like, for example, the number of zeros in a count of job losses (Pelosi) or misplacing that pesky decimal point.
At best, we’ll put on our politically-correct face and say “they exaggerate”. In plain English, we’ll call them a liar. But in both cases, we’ll viewthe pusher of false “facts” with suspicion.
Case in point: President Obama kicked off his White House forum on health care reform with this statement, “The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds.”
There’s some real gloom & doom for you, eh? But the truth is that the President exaggerated. Or he lied. How you call it depends on whether you’re listening to Rush or Gibbs, I suppose.
Now, even giving 110% benefit of the doubt to data from what has come to be revealed as a flawed study used by the President’s “researchers”, the number would be 1 bankruptcy every minute. Even all the bankruptcies filed during the study period wouldn’t add up to one every 30 seconds. A more recent study puts the number at eight-tenths of one percent. That’s “point eight percent” of Americans reporting they lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs.
That’s a pretty significant difference. Especially when we’re being asked to hand over more of our hard-earned monies to fund the President’s plan. Truth is, facts matter. If you were building a new home and your contracter came and told you that you needed 20 feet of cabinets on a 10-foot kitchen wall you wouldn’t be very pleased, would you? You’d be wondering how they came up with such an exaggerated measurement, and maybe you’d even fire them for incompetence.
Our government, the President, is no different than that contractor. They work for us. And we need to hold them to the very same level of fairness and accountability that we expect from everyone else.
Perhaps even more so when they make such an issue of promising it.