Todd Tiahrt took part in a panel discussion last Sunday, at the Kansas University Health Center in Wichita.
“We have the best health care in the world,” Tiahrt said with some in the audience agreeing with him.
Of course he is wrong and our own newspaper printed an article from
MClatchy that said:
“If U.S. health care's so good, why do other people live longer?”The article went on to say:
“People live longer in just about every industrialized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around the Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double some of our industrialized peers.”
So as usual, Tiahrt was wrong. He made it clear he was opposed to any public system for those who can’t get insurance. He even said that Medicare wasn’t a good system because it doesn’t pay for everything and some doctors don’t like to take Medicare patients.
“Health care needs reform,” he said.
Then he went over all the usual blather of the Republican party, ….“less waste, less bureaucracy.” In other words nothing will really change.
It is ironic that
The Wichita Eagle ran a opinion piece warning the Republicans to “Keep false claims out of debate.”
The article said:
“Still, the first half of August’s great health care debate has left The Eagle editorial board wishing that Tiahrt and the other Republicans in Kansas’ delegation would get real themselves.
If Tiahrt really believes that, as he told an overflow Topeka crowd last week, “if you look at health care, it’s not a crisis,” he isn’t really looking at health care.
According to census and other state-by-state data released last week by the Department of Health and Human Services, in Kansas: More than 340,000 people, or 13æpercent of residents, don’t have health insurance, although 71æpercent of them live in families with at least one full-time worker. Providers lose more than $801æmillion to bad debt in taking care of the uninsured, a cost passed to covered Kansans in premium increases of roughly $900 per year. The average cost of a family’s health insurance premium has risen 105æpercent since 2000. Only 40æpercent of small businesses .”
American health care….Eewww!!
