GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

GOProud’s Barron and Sen. Coburn on Healthcare Reform

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GOProud’s chairman Chris Barron co-authored a piece on healthcare reform with US Senator Tom Coburn for The Advocate.  I want to open with this commenter at The Advocate, which is typical of the closeminded vitriol of most gay activists:

Seriously? Republicans concerned over GLBTs who have HIV/AIDS and who are scared? I’ve never heard of such a thing. In fact, the last things I remember are GWB slashing funding for HIV/AIDS care and that Nazi Reagan ignoring our community while we died. Republicans, bite me. I’ll never listen to you.

Few people know that Sen. Coburn was personally responsible for re-inserting HIV/AIDS funding into the Federal Budget when Bill Clinton zeroed-it out throughout his Presidency.  Inconvenient truths.

But back to the topic at hand:  the dangers of government run healthcare for those with HIV/AIDS.  Read the whole thing from Coburn & Barron, but here are few excerpts:

The federal government will spend $15 billion on AIDS treatment alone this year, yet due to the inefficiencies of the public-run program, thousands will not receive appropriate care. In recent years, two patients in West Virginia and five in Kentucky died while awaiting care on waiting lists for the RWCA AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Today there are 247 Americans on waiting lists for livesaving AIDS drugs in eight states. The number is expected to reach 500 by Christmas. Those on the ADAP waiting lists are disproportionately minorities and residents of rural areas.

Sadly, the waiting lists do not tell the whole story of how care is being rationed under this program. Many other ADAP patients, while receiving care, are being denied the best treatment. Fuzeon, the AIDS drug of last resort that has been successful in treating patients who no longer benefit from other drugs, for example, has been denied to ADAP patients in our nation’s capital.

With our neighbors in need, no one should question that we have an obligation to help those who lack access to quality, affordable medical care. But how?

The best solution is to prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against patients who are sick or who have preexisting conditions. These are some of the very reasons why we have insurance. Then we should give all Americans the same choices of health care coverage enjoyed by members of Congress, who can select from more than 10 different private health care plans. S. 1099, the Patients’ Choice Act, would guarantee that all Americans would be able to choose the health care coverage that best meets their individual needs with creating a new government program. The Patients’ Choice Act will put you, not insurance companies, bureaucrats, or politicians, in charge of your own health care decisions.

We can and should work to make sure that every man, woman, and child in this country has access to quality, affordable health care. No one should be denied access to health care that would improve or extend their life. The good news is that we can do this. We can do it without creating an inefficient and expensive government program and we can do it in such a way that empowers individuals to take control of their own health care.

RELATED STORY: D.C. officials to scrutinize spending by AIDS groups – Washington Post

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Comments

  1. I’ve read the comments written by the readers of the article. If Sen. Coburn is such a bigot, then why did he co-write an essay with an openly gay man???

    Bigots don’t consort with the people they hate!!!

  2. Seriously? Republicans concerned over GLBTs who have HIV/AIDS and who are scared? I’ve never heard of such a thing. In fact, the last things I remember are GWB slashing funding for HIV/AIDS care and that Nazi Reagan ignoring our community while we died. Republicans, bite me. I’ll never listen to you.

    The willfully arrogant ignorance of liberals never ceases to astound. Not only are his statements false, but Obamacare will be devastating for people with HIV/AIDS and the gay “community” the exact same way it will be devastating for all people who actually need care:

    1. those people’s lives DEPEND on medical innovation. Guess where the VAST majority of HIV drugs have come from? The greedy, selfish, capitalist United States of America! Only FOUR percent of the world’s new drugs are discovered by countries that have socialized medicine.
    2. the price controls that are the result of socialized medicine will drive the people who develop new drugs out of business, just exactly the way that government interference has driven all but THREE flu-vaccine manufacturers out of business, causing shortages and resulting in increased deaths in recent years.
    3. HIV activists will lose whatever political influence they have when advocates for diseases that affect far more Americans are forced, by the socialization of health care, to also to lobby government for the funds that USED to be provided them by the private market.
    4. Government already denies coverage for some HIV medicines, favoring older, cheaper medicine that require people with HIV to take more medicine more often, which leads to more missed doses and more drug resistance. Drug resistance leads to death.
    5. And lastly, or the last I can think of off the top of my head, Im sure theres many more reasons Obamacare will be worse, but I predict that if there is some sort of public health care option where government pays for care, that HIV rates will skyrocket. They are already climbing as the success of HIV medicines leads some gays to have less safe sex. When the government pays for all those very expensive HIV meds, the rate of unsafe sex and the rate of HIV infection will climb even more.

    Republican health care policies are FAR better for both gays and people with hiv!

  3. I like it that Barron and Coburn are putting the Gay Left to shame, but I am deeply troubled by the left-wing premises visible in their own views. From their article:

    The best solution is to prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against patients who are sick or who have preexisting conditions.

    No. That’s not the best solution. Not at all. It forces young and/or responsible people to pay much more for insurance than they deserve to. Naturally, many of them will balk. The next step? Mandates (i.e., mandatory purchase of health care), which is essentially a form of fascism.

    No one should be denied access to health care that would improve or extend their life.

    There are so many things wrong with that, I hardly know where to start.

    First – the unspoken corollary would be that people should be denied access to health care that supposedly, allegedly, does not improve or extend their life. But who is to make that judgment about what will improve or extend someone’s life? Particularly in an environment where everyone must be provided for, by government dictat? Next step: Death panels.

    Second – I can think of a few people who possibly, perhaps, should be denied access to health care that would improve or extend their lives. How about death row inmates? Or people who don’t want their lives improved or extended? How about people who made the choice to break our laws in the way they came here? Or how about terrorists?

    Third – If Barron and Coburn really believe that, why aren’t *they* out there, right own, spending *their own* money and time on providing health care? It’s clear from the context of their article that they, just like leftists, are really talking about doing it with Other People’s Money. Just like leftists, their real proposal is to use government force to loot people’s lives and pocketbooks. That is profoundly immoral.

    If you accept immoral left-wing premises about health care – that it is somehow owed to everybody, not because of their economic and other contributions to society but simply because of their existence – then you are driven inevitably to left-wing solutions – like the user of government force, death panels, rationing and “public options”. Left-wingers at least have the virtue of consistency, or of following their logic to its real conclusions.

  5. Or this gem, from their article:

    With our neighbors in need, no one should question that we have an *obligation* to help those who lack access to quality, affordable medical care.

    Emphasis added. Again, in the context of the article, the “obligation” is conceived, not as an ethical or moral obligation to be met by private citizens, but as an excuse for various forms of government force.

    Sorry, Barron and Coburn. I not only question, but totally reject the idea that “we have an obligation to help those who lack access to quality, affordable medical care” – in the sense you apparently meant. Your version is only watered-down communism.

  7. One thing that astonishes me about the support that Obamacare gets from the LGBT community is with all the talk about how people’s lifestyle choices are going to be changed or else, is that no one seems to think that HIV/AIDS funding can’t be lumped with smoking/lung cancer, etc. President Obama has already broken explicit promises to the homosexual community about Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. What makes you think he’ll keep an implicit promise about HIV/AIDS funding?

  8. I can’t agree with everything in the article (see ILC & Brendan comments) but it certainly illustrates the likely malfeasance we’d see in any new programs.

    Odd, isn’t it, how states like California and New York come up with some of the stupidest people to ever sit in Congress and a “back water” like Oklahoma can come up with people like Coburn (James Inhofe, David Boren, and Henry Bellmon who died a couple of weeks ago – RIP).

    http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=12&articleid=20090929_12_0_OKLAHO50963&allcom=1

  9. Louise, you remind me of another excellent reason why people in the gay community should oppose government run health care. When the government pays your medical bills, the taxpayers have a say in EVERYTHING you do that affects your health. From drinking soda pop to sodomy. You cannot have a right to privacy when your medical bills are being paid by the taxpayers.

  10. I’m still amazed how liberals would find Coburn an alleged “bigot”, and yet throw money and votes at racist, sexist, homophobic bigots with a D after their names.

    How pathetic is that?

  11. I like when people try to justify based on ‘lifestyle choices’. My lifestyle choices include that huge yard that takes 4 hours to mow, and additional time at the piano and playing with power tools. Loving men isn’t quite so much a choice. . .

  13. I really can’t say I don’t understand the suspicions and distrust with which gay people treat Republican senators, especially one from Oklahoma. Republicans do not care one iota about gay people, unless it means taking rights from them, preventing them from gaining more rights, or willfully ignoring a plague that’s killing thousands of them (yes, that’s the legacy of the disgusting homophobe Reagan who sat back and watched thousands of people suffer the most horrific deaths and the worst stigma all because he hated gay people. I know lots of gay guys who were adults through the 80s in the U.S. and they will NEVER forget what the Republican party did not do for gay people during the outbreak of AIDS).