Stephen Hawking Erroneously Found Dead in "Death Panel" Marketing
How interesting. I learned from Avedon Carol (who learned from Wonkette….) of an editorial in the Investor's Business Daily that, in explaining how government-run-healthcare "death panels" wold imperil your grandmother's life, used as the centerpiece of it argument that famed physicist Stephen Hawking, whose life is challenged with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) would be dead today if he had to live under the UK's socialized healthcare system.
Of course, this is a major gaffe since Stephen Hawking, who is still very much alive, does live under the much-reviled-by-conservatives UK's socialized healthcare plan. Should this small, tiny, insignificant error of fact cast any doubt on the rest of the editorial about "death panels" in Obamacare"s socialism?
Quite evidently the word got back quickly to IBD; I had to go to the Google cache to find the original version because a "correction" had already been applied by the time I got to their website. Here's the original:
The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.
The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the "quality adjusted life year."
One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.
The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
The British are praised for spending half as much per capita on medical care. How they do it is another matter. The NICE people say that Britain cannot afford to spend $20,000 to extend a life by six months. So if care will cost $1 more, you get to curl up in a corner and die.
[editorial, "How House Bill Runs Over Grandma", Investor's Business Daily, "Posted Friday, July 31, 2009 4:20 PM PT", from the google cache.
Now, in the "corrected" editorial (at this link that, oddly, still carries the original posting date even though the complete text is obviously of a later date that is nowhere indicated), the paragraph I've bolded above has simply disappeared.
What's more, there is now a note from the editor:
Editor's Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
Now the fabulous rhetorical question: Do you think the "error" was merely that of implying that Hawking did not live in the UK, or do you think that the error was more along the lines of using the great reputation of Hawking in a misguided effort to smear the very good socialized healthcare system in the UK — the socialized healthcare system, by the way, that has kept Hawking alive all these years! — in an underhanded attempt to smear the idea of a public-health option in the US by promoting the ridiculous idea that "death panels" would evaluate your granny's social worth before carting her off to make soylent green?
Tsk tsk tsk. I would offer the IBD a nice shovel to dig their own hole a little deeper but shovels available for this purpose in the healtcare "debate" seem to be in rather short supply at the moment, what with so many being used to dig up the grassroots for astroturf.
[Update, 12 August:] Hawking, still alive, is quoted in the Guardian [UK] (Hugh Muir, "Diary", 11 August 2009) as saying
"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told us. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."
Is this a trustworthy attribution? Has anyone seen Hawking's birth certificate? Or, maybe more appropriately, Hawking's death certificate? Speaking of which, I don't think I've ever seen one for Elvis!
[Update, 13 August:] I couldn't pass up the chance to add a link to Geoffrey Pullum's piece ("Damn speech synthesizer" 13 August 2009) at Language Log on the issue of Hawking's citizenship, synthesized accent, and lack of actual death. I'm still surprised that the "death-panel palinists" didn't demand to see Hawking's actual death certificate. Tsk.
In: All, Current Events, Laughing Matters, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Will Rogers Moments
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To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 at 23.19
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This epitomizes the knowledge, quality of thought, lack of reasoning and freeforall resort to spreading BS by the knownothing government haters, all-purpose resenters and haters, selfish jerks and corporate errand boys and girls fighting health care reform. I just watched a long stretch of Sen. Arlen Specter's town hall bitch-and-moan session on C-SPAN. Diatribes and bloviations against reform serve as a stark indictment of a large measure of US child raising and education. Or, more to the point, lack of those things.
on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 at 11.39
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I think it's at this point where we say "Tell us what you really think, SW", but I believe you've said it with more vigorous panache than I could manage, so thanks for that!