For those who do not obsess over HCR, you may have missed a little ditty by Nick Kristof that appeared in the NYT last week. Titled, “Are We Going to Let John Die?”, this twice over Pulitzer Prize winning reporter delivers a piece so ludicrous, so absurd that we can only stand back in horror wondering how desperate those on the far left must be right now. We generally do not label people in this manner– but we take the stance that most rational people would: those on the far end of any continuum likely have some issues and are best left alone to putter about in their sandboxes.

SO, Michelle Malkin, writer, commentator and seeming all around good egg comes up with this great, great knife thrust to Mr. Kristof.

We present below her dissection of this piece. Kudos to Ms. Malkin– have a look at her blog and her writing. She is good. She won our respect.

And, if you really want a double dose of how good she is, go to this piece here for a really robust “discussion” about the NYT piece that sparked all of this. Just a little sneak peak:

In response to the NYTimes’ crappiest column on Obamacare ever, which I dissected earlier today, a neurologist in Oregon has posted the following noteworthy and newsworthy comment on columnist Nick Kristof’s blog:

In all due respect, this patient did not come see me. If he had and needed care he would get it. Cavernous hemangiomas have a low bleed rate and are only excised if surgery is low risk. They rarely result in a catastrophic bleed. I have many paitients that are observed with cavernomas rather than surgically excised. Others undergo craniotomy for resection. I suspect this journalist is bending the facts because he has an agenda. The gentleman with the cavernoma is welcome to call my office and I will see him. I would ask that the writers of the New York Times write factual editorials rather than sensationalizing a story. You are not being helpful.

Johnny Delashaw
Professor of Neurological Surgery
Oregon Health Sciences University
Portland Oregon

How about those apples? Mr. Kristov is looking a bit egg-covered. My how the far left must be desperate.

______________________________________________________

How crappy is this piece? Let us count the ways:

1) Crappy journalism. Read through the column and you won’t find a single doctor, hospital official, or Oregon Medicaid official quoted. Did Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kristof bother to try and confirm Brodniak’s medical condition with another source. Nope:

The doctors warn that pressure from the growth could lead a major blood vessel nearby to burst, killing him. “They tell me I’m a time bomb,” John said. With a touch of bitterness, he adds, “It sort of feels as if they’re playing for time to see if it bursts, to save them from doing anything.” I’m not a physician, and I certainly can’t speak to the medical issues here. But I have examined John’s medical records, and they appear to confirm his story.

As for why Brodniak hasn’t been able to get the surgery he says he needs, all we have is this:

John says the principal obstacle to treatment appears to be simply his lack of insurance.

And why won’t any doctor do the surgery? All we have is what Brodniak told Kristof:

In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn’t been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low.

Deep investigative journalism there! Would a New York Times editor ever allow a conservative columnist arguing against Obamacare to get away with this kind of sourcing? I have contacted Oregon’s Medicaid office, by the way, for comment and response to Kristof.

2) Crappy emotionalism. The column leaves the tear-jerking impression that Brodniak is just inches away from dying for lack of health insurance — and that he is a shining example of why, in Kristof’s words, “universal coverage” is so “urgent.” But, um, Kristof himself reports an inconvenient fact in his overwrought column:

Brodniak has government health insurance! You read it in the sentence quoted above:

In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program…
So, the problem isn’t the absence of a government-run safety net. The problem is apparently too-low reimbursements in his case. But Kristof apparently didn’t seek any confirmation of Brodniak’s assertion that those considerations (a general problem in Oregon) were specifically at the heart of Brodniak’s apparent experience with denial of care.
And Kristof apparently is too busy gnashing his teeth about heartless politicians and greedy doctors to think about what Obamacare would actually do to solve what he and Brodniak assert is the underlying problem.

Let me help: Obamacare would slash government health care reimbursements, not raise them. Open any local newspaper and you’ll find a doctor decrying the proposed Democrat cuts, Sherlock. See also: 45% of doctors would consider quitting under Obamacare.

3) Crappy follow-up. Kristof leaves the distinct and dire impression that Brodniak’s wife and children were also cruelly left out in the cold — and that only “universal coverage” can save them all! But you may recall that Obama signed massive tobacco tax hikes into law to expand S-CHIP. Kristof doesn’t say whether Brodniak had applied for his children prior to gaining Medicaid coverage and if not, why not.
Kristof actually does hit on a very real problem that needs fixing: Dependence on employer-based health insurance. The GOP and conservatives have proposed alternatives to address this problem. Kristof is silent on the matter.

Too practical. Not human drama-inducing enough.

Reader Greg e-mails another unsolved mystery: “[I]f someone lost his insurance because he lost his job, why didn’t he qualify for COBRA coverage? It’s expensive, but if this condition is life threatening as Kristof claims, then John himself has apparently put a price tag on his own well being.”

4) Crappy hypocrisy. Kristof sounds the usual moonbat talking points in invoking the cost of the war in Afghanistan to justify shrugging at the costs of a government health care takeover.

He might be able to get away with this if had been a consistent opponent of the Afghanistan invasion from day one. But back when New York Times columnists backed the Afghanistan invasion in the months after the 9/11 attacks, Kristof argued passionately that the war wasn’t merely worth the cost — but was actually a net life-saver.
Remember?

A Merciful WarBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: Friday, February 1, 2002
One of the uncomfortable realities of the war on terrorism is that we Americans have killed many more people in Afghanistan than died in the attack on the World Trade Center.Over the last couple of months I’ve tried to tabulate the Afghan death toll. My best guess is that we killed 8,000 to 12,000 Taliban fighters, along with about 1,000 Afghan civilians.
So what is the lesson of this? Is it that while pretending to take the high road, we have actually slaughtered more people than Osama bin Laden has? Or that military responses are unjustifiable because huge numbers of innocents inevitably are killed?
No, it’s just the opposite.
Our experience there demonstrates that troops can advance humanitarian goals just as much as doctors or aid workers can. By my calculations, our invasion of Afghanistan may end up saving one million lives over the next decade.
What happened to your cost-benefit calculator, Mr. Kristof?

5) Crappy junk science. Kristof ends his column by citing the bogus health statistic that won’t die. Let’s look again at the quote:

John’s story is not so unusual. A Harvard study, to be published next month in the American Journal of Public Health, suggests that almost 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of not having insurance. John may become one of them.

As I reported last month, the study was the work of dyed-in-the-wool single payer zealots who had no way of assessing whether the survey participants received insurance coverage between the time they answered the questionnaires and the time they died and no way of assessing whether the deaths could have been averted with health insurance coverage. A significant portion of those classified as “uninsured” may not have even been uninsured, based on past studies that actually did verify insurance status. But the agenda-driven researchers just took the rate of uninsurance from the original study (3.3 percent), applied it to census data, and voila: more than 44,000 Americans are dying from lack of insurance.

So, Kristof cites a junk science study to bolster his rallying cry on behalf of a man who might become the next casualty of lack of health insurance. Except that he does have health insurance and the current single-payer-friendly Democrat proposals on the table would do nothing to save Brodniak from death.

Pultizer Prize-level journalism from the Fishwrap of Record.