Column: 'Free' health care bankrupting system

I have little to add to Tom Cantlon's comments on the scattershot 'argument' presented by Dr Eck here. But there are a few notable factors that readers have yet to note.

First, it's not noted in the footer that Dr Eck and her husband are not only practicing physicians, but they're set up a Christian nonprofit to provide free health care to the poor, running it on donations and volunteer labor. She has also been an activist working to eliminate government programs from health care for many years, and is particularly alarmist about the recent health-care reform, quite freely making up her own facts in print.

Notice her anecdote about the Liberian missionary? Apparently she thinks the US should have just let him in and given him free health care too, like the unspecified tourist in the previous story. She seems to be complaining that we don't let people access health care for free if we know they're coming in sick. Or maybe that we should be doing that for everyone except Christian missionaries.

This treatise is remarkably free of solutions to the problems it trumps up, and more than a little alarmist about those devious foreigners out there -- leaving aside that if hospitals and health-care providers really have a problem with indigent care, the vast majority of it is related to serving legal Americans, and that's a clear argument in favor of public reform.

The Courier editors are very happy to fan the flames with an alarmist headline that's patently untrue and a photo in the online version prominently featuring people of color in a waiting room. The message is blatant and ugly.

It also has no connection with our area. You might think the editors could find a similar polemic by a Yavapai County author, but they either couldn't or didn't bother.