National health scare

There’s an old saying that you might hear in bars where journalists gather: don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Well, Investors Business Daily certainly took that approach as it waded into the great American health care debate. An editorial proclaimed that famed physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance” if he lived in the UK and had to rely on Britain’s National Health Service to treat his ALS. Well, as just about everybody other than the editorial writer seems to know, Professor Hawking actually lives in Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts) and has not, in fact, been tossed onto some mythical human refuse heap. In fact, as he later declared, “I would not be here today if not for the NHS.” Facts, oh those inconvenient facts. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, called the mistake “the blooper heard around the world.” “Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point,” Krugman continued. “Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain.” Investors Business Daily ran a half-hearted correction, but by then the story had gone viral. And not even America’s much vaunted for-profit medical system can do much about a virus. Suddenly newspapers and blogs were full of commentaries about the perceived horrors of socialized medicine. It mattered not a bit that the “single payer” system of health care doesn’t have a single prayer of becoming reality in the United States. It is, after all, much easier to create a false bogeyman than to debate the merits of actual proposals. In a polemic, facts are the enemy. Of course it’s not just journalists who play fast and loose. Before the death last month of Edward Kennedy (D-Mass), Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) was widely quoted saying the National Health Service would have killed off his colleague if given half a chance: “I’ve been told that the brain tumor that Senator Kennedy has,