Tom Coburn is Dumb: Tom Coburn gives his health care solution

Tom Coburn's Health Care Solution: Ask Your Neighbor!

For an example of vapid ignorance and cruelty so staggering it's almost not to be believed, watch the above video of Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn tell a weeping woman why this country does not need health care reform.

OK, did you watch it? Did you hear Coburn tell this woman--sick with grief over her husband's illness and their lack of insurance options--that the "government is not the answer" mere seconds after he told her to come to him (the government) for help?

Did you hear Coburn say that the main thing no one is talking about in the health care debate is "our neighbors"? As if rather than having affordable health insurance for everyone, we can all just go next door and borrow a low deductible like a cup of freaking sugar?

Would anyone care to share anything ever uttered by a politician that's stupider ? I'm sure there are plenty of contenders, but for the sheer brass balls and logical inconsistency that Coburn displays in that clip--well, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything better.

This is the rather obvious not-a-secret that the Republican Party and anti-health reform advocates keep trying to obfuscate: They don't have a plan.

They don't have a plan because they are off in Never-Neverland thinking that 47 million uninsured people will suddenly find help through "market forces." They essentially don't think there is a problem with health care.

But there is a big, massive, epic, metastasizing problem.

A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences found that the lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths per year--or one dead American every half hour (and I'd bet anything that number has only gotten worse in the past five years).

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof points out, even if Obama did want to send unmarked vans of mobile "death panels" around putting the elderly to sleep, he certainly couldn't do it as effectively as our health insurance system (or lack of one) does it now.

Furthermore, an American Journal of Medicine study found that 62% of bankruptcies are the result of skyrocketing medical bills. These bankruptcies have increased 50% in just six years, and remember that little financial crisis we went through in fall of 2008? Well, some of the first dominoes in that chain reaction were people not being able to pay their medical bills.

Oh, and the kicker? Of those medical bankruptcies, 78% of the people actually had health insurance. As has been noted again and again, most Americans are happy with their health insurance until they actually have to use it. That's how insurance companies make money--not by providing some essential service, but attempting to cover as few sick people as possible.

But yeah, I guess we could just send all those medical bankruptcies to their neighbors.

So congratulations, Senator Coburn! You've just won my award for Dumbest Rhetorical Argument Ever.

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