Steve Benen has a good catch from yesterday’s Sunday shows:
On “Meet the Press” yesterday, host David Gregory asked Kyl a very good question: “[Y]ou and other Republicans have said this healthcare reform should be opposed, and one of the major reasons you cite is how much money it costs, how much it could potentially add to the deficit, although the president says it’ll be deficit-neutral. And yet when you talk about the war in Afghanistan and the commanders should have more of their troops, I’ve never heard you say that that should be deficit-neutral, that war costs should somehow not break the bank. Why is that disparity there?”
Kyl responded by saying we can’t “scrimp and save or try to win a war on the cheap,” adding that the conflict in Afghanistan “is a war of necessity,” because of 9/11. Gregory followed up, asking whether it might also be a “necessity” to address the fact that “more and more Americans who die because they don’t have access to health insurance.”
Kyl replied, “I’m not sure that it’s a fact that more and more people die because they don’t have health insurance; but because they don’t have health insurance, the care is not delivered in the best and most efficient way.”
Here’s the video:
Kyl is just denying a basic fact – a recent Harvard study showed that 45,000 Americans die every year from a lack of health insurance. The uninsured routinely put off health care because they cannot afford the costs, leading to greater complications as disease and illness festers, and death. Recently, an uninsured constituent of John Boehner’s died from the swine flu because she didn’t go to the hospital for immediate treatment.
What Jon Kyl said regarding health care deaths is no different from what James Inhofe says on a daily basis about climate science.
