Many of us remember this rare bit of off-teleprompter blather from President Obama at a town hall meeting (filled with his sycophantic followers rather than the regular townsfolk, betraying another intentional deception). The brief experiment with not reading every word off a teleprompter ended immediately after this.
But the Stu Blog (“The most poorly named blog on the internet”) did a little background on the numbers. He catches lie number 8,635 from the genius President Honesty Transparency W. Post-Race Bi-Partisan Hussein Obama:
Obama gaffe gets retroactively dumber
So, we all remember this super-super classic…don’t we? It’s worth watching again [Joel provides actual clip, above]…
“Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.”
Up until now, this has been funny just because of the supposedly brilliant President butchering the language. It’s also been used as a prime piece of evidence in the “imagine if George W. Bush did this” file.
Today, it gets retroactively worse.
Forget about the speaking problems here for a second, and think about what he’s actually saying. It’s one of many times he’s made the case that unneeded trips to the emergency room are a major factor in the high cost of health care. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for him—somebody took the time to look into it:
E.R. care represents less than 3 percent of healthcare spending, only 12 percent of E.R. visits are non-urgent, and the majority of E.R. patients are insured U.S. citizens, not uninsured, illegal immigrants.
So, if we were to completely eliminate non-urgent E.R. visits (which of course would be completely impossible), you’re looking at a savings of around 0.4% of health care spending. It’s actually less than that, because I’m not accounting for the higher relative cost of urgent visits, useful non-urgent care in off-hours, or the fact that most of the care is for the insured — but I’m feeling really generous.
Also, Massachusetts has shown us that Obama style health care doesn’t work to lighten the load on our emergency rooms. Even though easing the burden and costs of the E.R. was used as a main selling point for universal health care in Massachusetts — there has been a significant increase in both the number of E.R. visits and overall E.R. costs since its implementation.
It’s enough to make you reach for your breathalyzer…or….inhalator. Sorry, I haven’t had too much sleep in the last 15 months or so.
Still though, nothing beats the inane extreme-left-wing rantings and pure intellectual dishonesty of the then-health minister in Canada, Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh (who sounds very much like a communist to me), who kept saying (maybe still does) that in the U.S., people are “dying in the streets” because of the private sector-run (or “American-style” as he always called it with a sneer) health care system, in which everybody needs an American Express card or they’re left to die. “That means somebody might check your wallet before they check your pulse,” he once said, surely knowing he was full of it and that the more weak-minded of his socialism supporters were lapping it up.
I don’t need to tell you this —I provide this for the benefit of liberals: Men of honor who are confident of themselves and their positions — and those who hold positions of leadership as both these men did or do — foster an honest debate. But neither of these men were, or are. No wonder they’re both losers.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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