A SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE SYSTEM AND TERRORISM. Fox News has joined the health care financing debate in their usual sensational way. Neil Cavuto asks whether a single-payer health care system would make it easier for terrorist physicians to enter the United States, and finds someone to argue that this would indeed be the case. Josh Marshall's people at the Talking Point Memo caught it all on a video. If you care to watch it, pay attention to the emotional manipulation taking place on the right side of the screen with a burning car shown during the whole interview. Note also the text running at the bottom of the screen. And what can be said about the opinions of Jerry Bowyer, the person Cavuto chose to interview? His strongest argument seems to be that creating a single-payer system would require more physicians than are currently working in this country, and that the extra physicians would have to come from abroad and some of those could be...you know...terrorists. Why this need for more physicians? Perhaps Bowyer admits that many Americans are currently not getting the medical services they need. In any case, foreign lands are not the only place where additional physicians can be found if they are deemed necessary. Bowyer might be surprised to learn that the United States actually has medical schools, for example.
-- J. Goodrich
