As has been well documented here, Investors Business Daily wrote a ridiculous editorial last week against health care reform including this golden paragraph:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
This laughably horrible example destroyed their entire editorial which attempted to prove to its readers that Death Panels are real and eugenics are on the horizon.
The Columbia Journalism Review also pointed out that IBD's "correction" misstates their mistake as purely geographical:
Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
It has removed the Hawking reference from the story (even, apparently, in Factiva, which doesn’t have it either), but short-arms the correction, which should have read something like: "This version corrects the original editorial which falsely implied that physicist Stephen Hawking would be dead as a doornail if he lived in the UK and had to use the National Health. Hawking has lived in the UK his entire life, and as of press time, is still alive.
And that was the end of it. Egg on the face of IBD, and we can all laugh at the idiotic talking points they have come up with. And then, glutton for the stoopid that I am, I checked back at IBD today and read their rebuttal.
Much has been made of this statement in one of our Aug. 3 editorials: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K. where the National Health Service would say the quality of life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
It was a bad example, and we have acknowledged that. To repeat the correction we ran shortly after the editorial ran: Hawking, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the progressive neurodegenerative disease often referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease, is indeed a British subject.
Actually you didn't acknowledge that. You acknowledged your crack writing/research staff didn't know where Stephen Hawking is from, but the correction (if intellectually honest) should also read that he is not dead, despite being a patient in British healthcare.
This is nit-picking...but then they follow with this moebius logic:
We also say that not everyone suffering from a debilitating disease is Stephen Hawking, and we hope our critics would acknowledge that. Hawking is a renowned theoretical physicist, university professor and best-selling author. It is doubtful any National Health Service bureaucrat would cut him off.
Hawking, in response to a query from London's Guardian newspaper that was apparently prompted by our editorial, was quoted Tuesday as saying: "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."
We accept this testimony and good fortune.
Get it? Stephen Hawking is only spared by the British health care system because he is famous and smart. Putting aside the fact that their original claim was that even someone as famous and smart as Stephen Hawking would die if he were British, let's see if this is true. Did Stephen Hawking begin getting his medical care after becoming a famous physicist?
From his biography(as footnoted in Wikipedia):
The diagnosis of motor neuron disease came when Hawking was 21, shortly before his first marriage, and doctors said he would not survive more than two or three years. Hawking gradually lost the use of his arms, legs, and voice, and is now almost completely paralysed.
So at 21 (1964) Hawking was given a 2 year prognosis. When did he become famous and successful?
During his first two years at Cambridge, he did not distinguish himself, but, after the disease had stabilized and with the help of his doctoral tutor, Dennis William Sciama, he returned to working on his Ph.D.[8] He revealed that he did not see much point in obtaining a doctorate if he were to die soon. Hawking later said that the real turning point was his 1965 marriage to Jane Wilde, a language student.[8] After gaining his Ph.D., Stephen became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.
Hawking was elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982, and became a Companion of Honour in 1989. Hawking is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
So as a poor graduate student and young adult (like many of the uninsured in America) Stephen Hawking was cared for by the National Health Services (which was founded in 1948). He was not famous. He was not successful. He was a young kid with a terrible diagnosis of Lou Gehrig's Disease. And he was able to go on to do his amazing work with the help of the NHS.
IBD goes on to argue that other Britons are not as fortunate, that breast cancers kills women everyday in the streets, and continues to rely on the debunked Betsy McCaughey. All of this is because the "Investors" can't argue against a robust public option on the facts. They continue to make boogeymen and lie about what is actually on the table.
And they still don't know squat about Stephen Hawking.