Ron Johnson has long-claimed that the reason he entered the U.S. Senate race was to protect the health care system that he felt was being ruined by the current health care bill, which he wrongly believes is a government take-over of our health care system.
Repeatedly, Johnson has claimed that any government interferance with medicine would substantially decrease the quality of health care in the United States and has specifically said (at nearly every campaign stop) that his daughter's life likely would not have been saved if our nation's health care system had been plagued by goverment interferance.
The Oshkosh Northwestern, however, is reporting today that Johnson had no problem going to a government hospital (the University of Minnesota Medical Center, UMMC) and seeing a life-long goverment doctor, Dr. John Foker when his daughter needed the best health care available:
Health care struck particularly close to home for Johnson based on an experience that happened only a few years after his family moved to Oshkosh in the late 1970s. His daughter, Carey, was born with a congenital heart defect that required a risky surgery to repair. He talks openly about the incident and its impact on him, about how his daughter recovered and now works as a neo-natal intensive care nurse, and how the University of Minnesota surgeon’s bill was only $1,200.
To Johnson, it is evidence that America’s health care system is the best in the world and health reform will impair doctors’ abilities to provide top-notch care.
"Now I really don't begrudge Oprah, Barbara Streisand or any other Hollywood actor for their financial success. But I will say, if anyone in this country deserves to be a millionaire, it is people like Dr. (John) Foker and Dr. Thomas who have saved thousands of lives because of their lifetimes of hard work and their incredible dedication to their profession," he told the crowd at the rally that included Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber from the 2008 presidential campaign.
Of course, most of us, when we want to see the very best specialists, go to one of the nearby public-university's hospitals, which are government instutions through-and-through.
Johnson, however, has made his bread-and-butter on this campaign attacking anything that is in anyway goverment-related and not "free-enterprize" and "profit-based" as being intrinsicly wrong, famously telling a Tea Party crowd that the "only thing Conservatives want is to be left alone!"
Clearly, this is the most glaring example of Johnson's hypocrisy yet: When he needed the very best medical care possible, he took his daughter to a goverment hospital, because, by his own admission, that was the best place in the world to go. Clearly in this case he did not want "to be left alone."
Here's the kicker, though: That fine surgeon that saved Johnson's daughter's life is a Feingold supporter! In fact, in 2004 he gave Feingold $250.
Please, please give to Feingold so he get the word out: He's being outspent five to one!