Nickname for fact-free Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle, who predictably makes arguments that have less to do with reality and more to do with wild-ass assertions meant to lend credibility to her libertarian bona fides. A self-proclaimed “economic libertarian” whose first blog was called I Am Jane Galt. See also, “Technically true, but collectively nonsense” and “It wasn’t a statistic-it was a hypothetical.”She's one of these people who uses all possible effort to be wrong about everything. It's stunning. In her latest column, though, I found that she was basically correct. Entitled "What Cutting Health Care Costs Looks Like" she describes how her mother was kicked out of the hospital before she had a chance to recover fully from a burst appendix.
McMegan still tries to spin the story into some libertarian squawk, but ultimately it shows a sympathy for how cruel cost-cutting can be. This naturally proves a point I made decades ago (on the State of the State, I believe) which is that while the joke goes that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, I add that a liberal is a conservative who lost his job. In this case, it's a similar indignity.
BTW, I do think the early-hospital-ejection is a major social problem in America and I think we can solve it. The first question to ask is, naturally, why hospital stays cost so much, but I am a practical man and I realize that there's no way to rebottle that efreet. I suggest a facility called a Recovery Clinic (RC) which would be like a 'nursing home' in the sense that it is a residence with 24/7 nursing care, but would allow the full recovery that the hospitals have overcharged out of their purview.
