Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Friday, March 2, 2012

Fair And Balanced

We have been very critical of Megan McArdle here at the Snark so we wish to commend her for her thoughtful and reasonable posts regarding her mother's health care. McArdle notes that our system has its flaws but in the end it is still the best of all possible worlds.

Ultimately, there's never going to be a perfect solution. There are good reasons for families to have a care-giving roles--and good reasons why that's often difficult. It's possible that for all the complaints, the current system represents the right set of tradeoffs: we ask families to pitch in when they can, and provide extra help when they can't.

We wish to praise the braveness with which Ms. McArdle faces the ever-mounting bills, the insurance companies, the lack of sleep, and the lost work opportunities. Not everyone would be as happy to pick up those burdens, especially as time passes and the burdens begin to take their toll. Fortunately we also know that whenever God closes a door he opens a window, and if the insurance companies refuse to pay one can just yell at them, very few people go into bankruptcy for medical bills, and a more socialist type of health care would kill millions.

9 comments:

  1. In that article, she repeatedly talks about how great it was that she worked for an employer who allowed her to 'work' from anywhere.

    The woman either has zero self awareness or is a complete sociopath.

    cynic

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  2. They invested a lot of money in her. Still, she might not want to make any large credit purchases right now.

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  3. For all her discussion about caring for a sick relative, there's no mention of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, either by McArdle or her commenters.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993

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  4. My favorite part of her second article is when she sneers at anecdotal evidence and then proceeds to write, "America puts almost everyone, including its charity patients, in at least semi-private rooms (the surgical ward my mother was on didn't seem to have anything except private rooms.). And to judge by local television, those rooms are much nicer than what's available elsewhere--hospital rooms in foreign film always look faintly third world to American eyes."

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  5. Still, she might not want to make any large credit purchases right now.

    Gee, I feel like it's a bad thing to wish her mom a long life.

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  6. Don't forget McMegan's arguments against providing health care for the old and sick!

    (So many, um, gems in that one. That was one of the first, if not the first, thing I ever read by her. It remains one of the best examples I've ever seen of mental masturbation, and poor ideas incoherently argued. But she's convinced she's brilliant. It's pretty disturbing to realize people were pointing out how appallingly vapid she was back in 2007. And she's still employed!)

    McMegan's mom gets the McMegan exception. When the glibertarian princess is in a Mcmagnanimous mood, at least.

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  7. The vapid predates 2007 by a few years. It's just that she wasn't part of the economist or the atlantic at the time.

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  8. Ms. Megan simply ought to tell her lazy ass mother to get off her fat ass and get back to work. Ms. Megan expects a healthy inheritance and she's suffered long enough for it. Ms. Megan doesn't want mommy pissing away that money to some hospital. There's a new $3,500 food processor on the market and Ms. Megan just has to have it. What's more, she deserves it.

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  9. Having an intimidating intellectual laid up in your house 24/7 must be very demanding. The rigorous honing of rhetorical skills and pressure to produce quality arguments must be intense. I would imagine this would transfer over to McArdle's work - how could it not? - and we would all be beneficiaries from her otherwise-unfortunate situation.

    This explains the six Heartland posts, and the explanation for why we should pity rich people.

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