Wallet Biopsies

Kevin Drum joins the Legions of Righteousness as we laugh at--not with, at--the Washington Post's Ben Domenech:

The Washington Monthly: THE APOCALYPSE....I'm feeling left out of the Ben Domenech bashing, so let's take a crack at his latest post, which he mildly calls "one of the ever-growing number of signs of the apocalypse": In brief:

A group of British doctors fought in court for the right to remove a fully-conscious little boy from a ventilator, over the objections of his parents, because they judged his quality of life to not be worth living.

Damn socialists. It's a good thing that a God fearing man like George Bush would never sign legislation to allow such a thing to happen, isn't it?

In any case, I'm glad to see Ben arguing that the state should be obligated to provide medical care for sufficiently sick people. It's a start

Kevin misrepresents George W. Bush's Texas law. Ben Domenech's hero, George W. Bush, went much further than the doctors in Britain wished to. Bush's law allows hospitals to pull the plug not in the interest of mercy--for patients in great pain, or with no consciousness--but in the interest of $$$$$: if you can't pay, your ventilator goes.

The Republican wingnut position is that your right to life is absolute--unless you're poor, and it gets in the way of the financial interests of some for-profit hospital.