If you've been following the SCHIP debate flare up in the last few days this is a real jewel.
From Ezra Klein who recently challenged Michelle Maklin to a face to face debate on SCHIP, anytime, anywhere
A typical experience with the individual health care market:
I have commented before on the problems with central planning in health care. I certainly am not convinced that a government-run system is the answer, but I do agree with Krugman that there are serious problems with our health insurance system, particularly in the market for individually-purchased (non-group) coverage.
After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that "choice" wasn’t much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.
We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage–a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.
With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.
The brilliant writer who penned these words?
Michelle Malkin.
Ezra writes:
As I've said before, if a neoconservative is a liberal who got mugged, and progressive is a Republican who got sick. Well, a Republican who got sick, but whose livelihood isn't dependent on generating an unending stream of outrage for a hardcore conservative audience. But can you really believe that the Michelle Malkin who wrote those paragraphs is the same one inveighing against subsidized health care for children of low-income, self-employed parents?
Yes. Unfortunately, as one commenter noted on Ezra's blog:
In 2004, Malkin concluded:
"Given our financial circumstances, that 'choice' wasn’t much of a choice at all."
I have no way of knowing for sure (and no, I'm not advocating an investigation into the Malkin finances), but I strongly suspect that the Malkin family's "financial circumstances" in 2004 were (and have remained) considerably better than that of the Frosts. She was already, after all, an author and nationally syndicated columnist by then (and her dreadful book on internment was only a month away from being published).
Yet when it came to health care, she complained of not really having a "choice" back then.
And what does she say of the Frosts today? What's the "bottom line" for Malkin?
The bottom line remains:
This family made choices. Choices have consequences.
Interestingly, Malkin ended up with a rather unsatisfactory "very high-deductible plan", a plan for which the Frosts probably couldn't have qualified anyway (given their pre-existing conditions), and even if they did, one which surely would have put them in the poor house if any of them met with an serious illness or accident.
But Michelles's going to spend her time running folks worse off than her and her family down?There's got to be a better word for this than hypocrisy. Oh, that's right. There is. It's 'Asshole'.
Update: here's a link to a good piece at TNR on the whole wingnuttia/Michelle Malkin SCHIP meltdown. h/t AnnArborBlue