November 25, 2009

Anthony Weiner Debates Health Care Reform With Stuart Varney

By Che

Topics:
Health Care
Right Wing Pundits

Have you ever been telling a story that you thought was a great story, but in the middle of telling your story, you realize that no one is interested in it because it is horribly boring? Then, to spice the story up, you have to embellish all of the details and basically lie so you do not look like a total tool?

Well, this is sort of the situation that Stuart Varney found himself in while debating Congressman Anthony Weiner. Let me explain.

As you can see from the video, Varney is obviously a J.V. level intellectual, but my analogy to telling a bad story comes in at about the 2:31 mark of the video.

Weiner, up to this point, has been wiping the floor with Varney. It must have finally started to sink in that he was losing the debate, because Varney resorted to, not only embellishing his arguments, but flat out lying in order to make himself not look like such a tool.

After Weiner finished explaining that the reason why the overhead to run a private health insurance company is roughly 30 times greater than it is to run Medicare, is because of the necessity to reward shareholders with profit, Varney responded:

[Health insurance companies] have to charge more…Private has to charge more because the doctor can’t get enough money out of Medicare and Medicaid.

I have never heard of such a ridiculous argument for why insurance companies charge so much. It makes absolutely no sense, because doctors are not required to accept Medicare or Medicaid. The point here is that if doctors were not getting adequately reimbursed by Medicare or Medicaid, all they would have to do is stop accepting it.

Furthermore, if I have understood Varney’s incredulous argument correctly, isn’t he accusing doctors of artificially inflating prices for certain patients, whose private health insurance plans will cover the inflated cost, to increase their personal revenue? That sounds vaguely like insurance fraud to me.

I wonder if Stuart “Little” realizes the magnitude of the charge he just wielded at American doctors?