The Daily Plunge

Did you know that if you don’t support the current Health Care legislation in the House and Senate you must want people to die? Yes, that’s the latest logic coming from liberal pundits. Evidently, hundreds of thousands will die if a bill of some kind isn’t passed. It doesn’t even matter what’s passed. As long as a paper reaches Obama’s desk that says “health care,” thousands of lives will be saved. Ezra Klein started the ball rolling at The Washington Post this morning. Klein reported that Lieberman is “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” Later in the day Matthew Yglesias repeated the same talking point (with a link to the study):

Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberal members do have an incentive to compromise–the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

Lieberman’s only crime so far is understanding the bill. Ah, Liberals are too smart to be bothered with facts. They really are advanced beings. We’re lucky to live in the world were facts can be made up to support any argument. Is it really surprising that it’s almost impossible for logic to worm it’s way into the left side of the debate. It really is a Joe Biden nation. Progressives really believe any kind of legislation will save thousands of lives. Wow, it’s a good thing they don’t believe abortion is killing human life. How would they deal with that?
Anyway, back to the study these geniuses are citing. Michelle Malkin deconstructed this study a while back…

So, how did these political doctors come up with the 44,000 figure? They used data from a health survey conducted between 1988 and 1994. The questionnaires asked a sample of 9,000 participants if they were insured and how they rated their own health. The federal Centers for Disease Control tracked the deaths of people in the sample group through the year 2000. Drs. Himmelstein, Woolhandler, and company then crunched the numbers and attributed deaths to lack of health insurance for all the participants who initially self-reported that they had no insurance and then died for any reason over the 12-year tracking period.

This seems like a sound study. Not having health care was the primary cause of death in every instance. A piano falls on someone; blame health care. Choke to death? Blame health care. With this kind of logic it’s just as easy to blame the fact that none of these people had an amulet of immortality. An amulet of immortality protects the user from death. Are the Democrats going to tackle “amulet of immortality reform” next? Here’s a clue; the government is just as likely to provide sustainable health care as an amulet of immortality.
So to recap… Which is worse: Republicans mentioning “death panels” or democrats justifying health care as a way to save “hundreds of thousands of people?”