Boehner, GOP sick with chronic irrationality

With a John Boehner speakership fast approaching, I dutifully read up on the man. I learned he is a Midwestern fellow, one of 12 siblings and a man whose early career was in plastics. What I did not know what was missing entirely from my reading is that he might be French.

Or Japanese. Or Finnish or British or even German. Whatever the case, this much is clear: No American, certainly not one about to occupy a leadership position, could possibly call the American health care system “the best health care system in the world,” as Boehner did last week.

For statistical refutation, we need only refer to the CIA's World Factbook (no leftie think tank, to be sure) and check the health statistics. The United States is 49th in life expectancy. We best the Libyans in this category but not Japan, France, Spain, the United Kingdom or Italy.

The same doleful situation applies to infant mortality. This is the saddest of all categories since it relates to infants who don't make it to their first birthday. The CIA tells us that the nations that do the worst in this category are, not surprisingly, mostly in Africa. Then comes much of Asia and parts of South America, but when you start getting up there a bit, Cuba does better than the U.S. and so does Italy, Hungary, Greece, Canada, Portugal, Britain and Israel, among others. This should be an embarrassment to us all, but to Boehner, these figures infants dying before they can get a cupcake with a single candle in it don't even exist.

Looking elsewhere, Boehner might come across a category called “avoidable mortality.” Among the richest nations, the U.S. is 19th of 19. America is awful at treating asthma, diabetes and kidney disease. If you have any of these, it's your bad luck that you're not Japanese or French or, really, anything other than American.

Boehner's sentiment is shared by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who has vowed to roll back the health care program. If McConnell thinks America has the best of all health systems, who can blame him? When in 2003 he underwent heart bypass surgery, it was at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. This is a government facility staffed by government employees what is sometimes called socialized medicine. His heart did fine, but he left the hospital untreated for Rampant Endemic Hypocrisy, a disease that has swept the GOP and left it vulnerable to irrationality.

Almost 51 million Americans lack health insurance. They postpone treatment, seeking it at the last minute from emergency rooms never a pleasant experience, never a cheap experience and often too late anyway. Obama's health care bill was meant to address this problem, among others. It was not a perfect bill and it may turn out to be the wrong way to go. But a difference in approach, even a difference in ideology, cannot change the need for reform. The U.S. spends upward of 17 percent of its GDP on health care. European nations spend about 8 percent and their citizens are actually healthier. Republicans oppose Obamacare. Fine. But where is their plan? Not the lauded status quo. As we can see, that's a terminal disease.

For Democrats, there's hope in Boehner's chirpy pronouncement. It shows a GOP out of touch with reality, a party of Marie Antoinettes, babbling total nonsense about health care. The same swing voters who used the election to hurt the Democrats might learn that America's health care system is No. 1 only in health-related bankruptcies. It is best in the world only for the rich and the amply insured. Everyone else can crawl away, unseen by the next speaker of the House of Representatives a jolly, detached fellow who thinks he lives in another country entirely.

2010, Washington Post Writers Group