While it's still too early to tell what the impact of the results from New Hampshire will have on all the candidates, it does seem likely that John Edwards third place finish has for all practical purposes knocked him out of the race. Which is a very good thing.
Monday's Wall Street Journal had a front page article on Edwards' shameful efforts to use a family's personal tragedy for political gain (sub req):
John Edwards has been bashing big health insurers in recent days with the story of a girl who died waiting for a liver transplant. But the details of the case suggest the Democratic presidential candidate may be oversimplifying the tale.
Nataline Sarkisyan had been battling leukemia for three years. Insurer Cigna Corp. rejected coverage for a liver transplant, then reversed its decision and said it would pay. The 17-year-old died before the operation could take place.
By pushing the case so hard on the campaign trail, Mr. Edwards is raising the emotional tone of the debate on health care, which has already emerged as perhaps the leading domestic issue in the campaign. Mr. Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton are among the Democratic candidates attacking health insurers.
"We need a president who will take these people on," Mr. Edwards said at the Democratic presidential debate Saturday night. He said Nataline "lost her life a couple of weeks ago because her insurance company would not pay for a liver-transplant operation."
He mentioned this particular case again in his concession speech last night. She lost her life because she had leukemia, not because of her insurance company.
Nataline's case could provide fuel to both sides of the argument about whether insurance companies generally do a good job covering Americans. The day before Thanksgiving, she received a bone-marrow transplant from her brother. Soon after, her liver failed, and she went into a coma. Her doctors at the medical center of the University of California, Los Angeles, recommended a liver transplant, saying that patients in such situations would have a 65% chance of living another six months.
Cigna said both its own medical experts as well as an outside transplant surgeon and a cancer doctor with transplant expertise concluded there wasn't enough evidence that the procedure would be safe or effective. But after the denial got press coverage, the company reversed the decision on Dec. 20 "out of empathy for the family." Nataline died later the same day.
To hear Edwards tell it, this is just another case of greedy heartless insurance companies willing to let a girl die just to save a few bucks. Oh wait...
Cigna said it wouldn't have benefited financially from denying the transplant because it only administered the health plan of Nataline's father's employer. In reversing the decision, it said it would pay for the transplant itself.
You can debate the way that Cigna handled the matter and whether they made the right decision in the first place or whether they should have reversed their original decision. But the bottom line is that in the best case situation the transplant may have extended her life for a few months.
Nonetheless, the case has found a natural fit with Mr. Edwards's pitch. The candidate is an experienced practitioner in the modern political art of putting an ordinary person's face on policy prescriptions. At yesterday's rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Edwards turned the microphone over to the family of Nataline. Her father, mother and brother emotionally spoke of her death and their anger at Cigna.
Her father, Grigor Sarkisyan, spoke in raw terms about his loss before a packed crowd of more than 500 people at the Franco-American Center in Manchester, N.H. He said he had promised to buy his daughter a white car when she got her driver's license. "After she passed away, I bought a coffin for her because Cigna -- they killed my daughter. I don't have a daughter any more."
In no way do I blame the parents for their reaction. Losing a child is one of the worst experiences anyone can go through. They're grieving their daughter and are emotionally devastated.
But it is truly cynical and despicable for John Edwards to take advantage of their grief and anger for his own political ends. Especially since he knows that no matter what outlandish promises he makes on the campaign trail, there is nothing in his universal health care plans that would have changed the outcome in this case. Unless he wants to cover everything for everyone in every circumstance (I guess that would be truly universal coverage)--which would drive health care costs to levels impossible to support for even a short period of time--there will always be cases like this. Every country that has government provided health care has rationing of some sort to control costs. And Edwards full well knows this.
That's why he's the most dishonest, demagogic candidate to come down the pike for some time. Remember when he promised that Christopher Reeves would walk again if John Kerry was elected? I'm surprised that he hasn't tried to combine the two tall tales:
"And if President Bush had only supported government financed fetal stem cell research Superman could have gotten out of his wheelchair and saved Nataline from the evil clutches of Cigna..."
Unfortunately, I think this tendency to blame someone for everything bad that happens and promise pie in the sky solutions to every single problem in life goes far beyond the rhetoric of John Edwards and as has afflicted much of our society.
Bret Stephens nailed this in a piece in Tuesday's OpinionJournal (free for all):
There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.
But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.
Bingo. This may be a stretch, but I wonder how much of this stems from the secularization of American culture. I don't mean secular as in not having at least a nominal belief in God (however watered down that belief may be), but secular in not recognizing that we live in a fallen world. A world of suffering. A world of pain. A world where people are not inherently good. A world where trying to build a utopian society is not only doomed to fail, but often more likely to spawn evil and far worse suffering.
If you really don't believe that there is something better waiting on the other side--something that transcends this world and is beyond our human understanding--and that this vale of tears is all there is, it would seem to follow that you would then not only seek to maximize safety, comfort, and security in this life, but that you would also believe that you were somehow entitled to such things and that if you are denied them in any way, then someone or something must be to blame.
Again, that may be a stretch. All I know is that hoping for a Superman to make everything better a prescription for disappointment. Super Man does not exist.
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