Huckabee on Pre-existing Conditions

By John Ballard

As of today several features of the Affordable Care Act become law, including the prohibition on health insurers from refusing coverage to children under 19 on the basis of "pre-existing conditions. (The law will include all Americans in 2014. We don't want to rush into anything, you know.)

In a fit of political enthusiasm Mike Huckabee, speaking at the Values Voters Summit ...a kind of big-tent showcase for the fundamentalist far-right base of the Republican Party, sponsored by such leading conservative lights as the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University compared people with plre-existing conditions with houses that had burned down, much to the amusement of his audience.

An Op-ed at Truthout by William Rivers Pitt, which should be read slowly and completely, says, in part

...I used to have a certain twisted affection for Mike Huckabee. I agree with virtually nothing he says, but I credit him for handing the 2008 GOP nomination to the very beatable John McCain during the primaries. The two most viable candidates, you will recall, were Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both of whom were jockeying for the all-important GOP base vote. But Huckabee was the darling candidate of that base, and kept getting 50% of that vote in every primary, which served to drastically undercut the Giuliani and Romney campaigns. Huckabee stayed in the race just long enough to ruin Rudy and Mitt before dropping out himself, and McCain won the nomination pretty much by default. The rest, as they say, is history.

After this weekend, however, that lingering affection has curdled completely. Huckabee took the podium at the Values Voters Summit to attack and denounce the Obama administration's health care reform legislation, which was par for the course as far as the event went. But Huckabee was not content merely to repeat the "It's a government takeover, let's repeal it" rhetoric, choosing instead to carve a bold new path into the annals of infamy:

When Republicans attack health care reform, Democrats like to counter by accusing Republicans of wanting to repeal a law that requires insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions. According to Republican Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, that's exactly right. People with pre-existing conditions, he explains, are like houses that have already burned down.

After citing the millions known to be affected by cardio-vascular disease, Parkinsons, MS and others, he concludes with this

All of them, in short, every single one of them, can basically just go die in Mike Huckabee's world. They are not worthy of coverage, treatment or consideration. The five diseases I listed account for well over a third of the American population, and if Mike Huckabee or someone who agrees with him somehow becomes president someday, those millions of people should just dig their own graves and lie down in them.

Yeah, that's why I'm not polite to these people. My wife has multiple sclerosis, and Mr. Huckabee this weekend compared her to a burned-down house. My wife is a vibrant, active woman who deals with a terrible, terrifying disease that costs upwards of $50,000 a year to treat. Thankfully, my wife was already insured through work when she was diagnosed, but there are many thousands of people out there with MS who have no insurance, or who won't have insurance when they get diagnosed. If Huckabee has his way, people with pre-existing conditions will be treated as burned-down houses and essentially left to die.

To hear a man who gets treated like a legitimate voice in American politics basically consign my wife and millions of other Americans to suffering and death is to hear nothing more or less than flat-out hate speech from a presidential candidate. What Mike Huckabee suggested is tantamount to eugenics, to the extermination of "weaker" people simply because they are ill.

If this kind of talk isn't enough to convince Republicans that the fringe of their party is to be avoided at all costs, then nothing in the world will. There have to be at least a few unwell Republicans in the country, right? There have to be some Republicans with heart trouble, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's or MS, right? If so, those people had better start digging that grave for themselves, especially if they are stupid enough to support Mike Huckabee or anyone else who agrees with him.