From the din certain people on the right have been making, they apparently think that the New York Times has the unilateral power to set American domestic economic policy. Someone really needs to explain to some people the difference between offering an opinion on a matter of public interest and tyrannically imposing dictates. Newspapers generally do the former. Very, very, very few people do the latter.

The pages of the New York Times featured a rather poorly-sourced, polemical piece by Eduardo Porter entitled “Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix.” He cites a 1984 study that found that for-profit nursing homes used far more sedatives on their patients than comparable nursing homes that were affiliated with churches, and therefore non-profit. The reason, according to Porter (citing other authors), was that sedatives are cheaper than caregivers, and it is better for the bottom line to dope up your residents as opposed to hiring trained staffers who can provide individual attention and treatment.

That sounds perfectly rational, actually. Is Porter right? Well, he only has the one study that was published during Reagan’s first term, along with a scattered assortment of other academic papers. That hardly builds up to a mountain of evidence indicting profit-driven nursing homes. There is a certain amount of common-sense appeal to the idea that nursing home administrators who are principally beholden to corporate shareholders have greater incentive to cut corners, and it certainly happens all the time. Nonprofit healthcare facilities, however, don’t exactly get to write blank checks for state-of-the-art care. Their motivation might be to stretch the money out until the next grant check arrives. Porter’s article raises some good questions, but does not give us enough information to state a definitive preference.

Of course, that doesn’t stop some people from going apoplectic. See, Porter committed the cardinal sin of saying something mean about the free market. The free market—sorry, the Free Market—is always right. Because shut up.

A Google search of the two authors of the 1984 study, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond, yields a treasure trove of overreaction. (Incidentally, their paper, “The Use of Hypnotics in Proprietary and Church-Related Nursing Homes,” does not appear to be available online, so none of us can check Porter’s work.) Let us bring on the hysterics!

One of the first Google hits is a place I swore I would never, ever go, Rush Limbaugh’s website. He discussed the NYT article on his radio show, and amazingly, the transcripts of the show are even more incoherent than the actual broadcast. The piece is cleverly titled “For-Profit Medicine Under Attack.” Once you get past Rush congratulating himself for correctly predicting….uh….something, he starts to yammer about the coming, uh……something…….

“One study found that patients’ mortality rates spiked,” that means they went up for those of you in Rio Linda, “when nonprofit hospitals switched to become profit-making, and their staff levels declined.” So get this: Profit-making leads to more death. Hospitals seeking profit equals a higher mortality rate. It’s right here in the New York Times. “These profit-maximizing tactics,” so now seeking profit is a tactic, “point to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of health care.

“They raise a broader, more important question: How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs?” Folks, this is just the first four paragraphs of this New York Times story, and it’s all here. Everything that our future holds is right here in these four photographs. Profit in the health care system, bad. Nonprofits, good. Private sector medical care, bad. Government-sector medical care with no profit, good.

The parts in quotes are sections of Porter’s article that Rush is reading on the air. See what he did? The 1984 study Porter discussed only compared private, for-profit nursing homes to private, church-affiliated non-profit nursing homes. Rush went and turned them into government-run nursing homes, and he’s not even trying to be subtle anymore. Rush is lying, and he knows his audience either won’t notice or won’t care. Continuing…

So the entire backbone/foundation of capitalism is under assault yet again, and I’m convinced people that read the New York Times are the equivalent of low-information voters. All they know is what’s in the Times. They’re low-information voters. They’re gonna eat this up. They’re gonna eat it pick up, and they’re gonna be quoting it. It’s gonna be all over Twitter and Facebook. It’s gonna cascade all over this country. It’s gonna dovetail quite nicely with where everybody is culturally and emotionally in the country right now.

Everybody’s hurting, the economy’s stagnating, but we all want to be well. Why should people be making a profit while they administer health care? It’s not fair! It’s greedy! It’s selfish! And it leads to some people not even being treated. If they can’t pay, if they don’t have insurance, that means no profit. That means they don’t get treated. That means they die! See what capitalism does? It kills!

And so on and so forth. I know it would be too much to ask for someone like Rush Limbaugh to provide counter-evidence during a rant, but he is not even trying to dispute the evidence that the for-profit hospitals mentioned in Porter’s piece had higher mortality rates. Rush just doesn’t think we should care about that because Free Market good.

Clay Waters at Newsbusters seems to think that accusing Porter of “mistrusting” the Free Market serves as an effective refutation of Porter’s arguments. Waters also doesn’t seem to know the difference between a grocery store and a hospital, thinking they are comparable “broad social needs” as discussed by Porter.

Well, food is a “broad social need” that’s covered quite effectively via a private sector phenomenon known as “grocery stores.”

When is the last time you needed food from a grocery store immediately or you would die? Actually, don’t answer that, because you’re too much of an asshole for me to care, Clay. Waters also declares, without support, that the Free Market “has provided more goods more cheaply to a larger number of people than any other system,” and presumably therefore we should shut up and die if hospital administrators deem it prudent to the bottom line.

Finally (because three articles of idiocy are all I can handle), a website called Big Health Report reprints Limbaugh’s rant, but gives it the catchy title “Private Sector Health Care (the Undisputed, World’s Best Healthcare System) Is Finished.” I dare say the editorial staff at Big Health Report has no idea what the word “undisputed” means (see also 1, 2, 3), or they are lying and know that their intended audience either believes their bullshit or does not care that they are lying.

I’m going to go with both the editors of Big Health Report and their readers being liars. The worst kind of liar: they are lying to themselves.

Photo credit: evobrained on stock.xchng.