Quote of the Day

"We don't have a setting across this country where if you don't have insurance, we just say to you, 'Tough luck, you're going to die when you have your heart attack.' No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it's paid for—either by charity, the government, or by the hospital. We don't have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don't have insurance."—Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who doesn't know shit about shit.

Romney said something extremely similar on 60 Minutes last month, but the above comment is from an interview he did this week with The Columbus Dispatch. Apparently, in the interceding month, no one has mentioned to the Professor of Healthcare at Fantasy University that, in fact, people do die in their apartments (why does he always imagine uninsured people living in apartments?!) because they lack health insurance.

Partly because lots of people who lack health insurance don't go to the emergency room even when they need it, for fear of crushing medical bills.

In fact, lots of people with shitty insurance—hell, lots of people with GOOD insurance!—make the same decision, because insurance doesn't cover everything. There are deductibles and "patients' portions," that can be 20% (or more) of extraordinarily expensive medical treatment.

I suppose that's something that doesn't matter to a dude worth $250 million, who's probably never even looked at his own medical bills and has no idea that his personal assistant pays whatever his patient portion is along with the rest of his piddling expenses.

But to average USians, taking on the cost of medical care, even with insurance, is something to consider, even in emergencies.

This guy doesn't understand—and evidently doesn't care to understand—a most basic reality of average people's experiences in this country. He is comprehensively unfit to lead a nation with whose residents' lives he hasn't even a cursory familiarity.

For the record: "Emergency rooms serve as a place of last resort, but 45,000 Americans still die every year because they lack health insurance, or one every 12 minutes."

Fuck off, Romney, you cloistered plutocrat.