This isn’t an academic question, by the way: there are kids with cancer who would like this administration to stop wrecking their health care.
Little Hunter Alford needs chemotherapy to treat the rare and deadly cancer he was born with but has lost his health insurance under an administrative blunder seemingly caused by Obamacare.
While the president’s signature policy promised that no one with a pre-existing condition would not be covered, the Affordable Care Act has seemingly caused the seven-year-old Gainesville, Texas, boy to face an agonizing wait for treatment as his parents battle to get him back on his insurance plan.
‘Why would you cancel a kid?’ asked his mother Krista Alford. ‘I really want to send Obama and all of them pictures of my son. He has scars all over his head. He doesn’t want to leave the house because he’s afraid people are going to make fun of him because he’s bald.’
There’s a moral/ethical precept in medicine: First, do no harm. Said precept is, unfortunately, not really sustainable as a matter of public policy, given that making good public policy decisions usually involves making hard choices. But not being able to avoid harming somebody does not mean that you should avoid harming as few people as possible. It certainly does not mean that you should roar around the china shop like a bull hoped* up on angel dust, which is the closest analogy that I can come up with to adequately describe Barack Obama’s (and the Democratic leadership’s) approach to health care policy.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: Note that this is not a loss-of-coverage problem. It is a They can’t get the system to work as properly as it did before they switched everything around problem. Feel free to explain to the kid’s parents why they shouldn’t be upset that the bull smashed things up.
*I know that it should be ‘hopped,’ but my original misspelling has a certain ring to it.