Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a fierce opponent of health care reform, frequently tells a powerful story about his daughter. In Johnson's tale, his daughter, born with a heart defect, would have died had the Affordable Care Act been in place when she was an infant.
Long-time readers may recall that nearly everything about the senator's story gets the policy details backwards. Indeed, Johnson's criticism has repeatedly been proven to be incoherent.
But Wisconsin blogger Jud Lounsbury took this one step further, reaching out to the surgeon, John Foker, who helped save the senator's daughter. As Johnson sees it, "Obamacare" would have forced Foker out of the medical field and prevented life-saving procedures from being developed.
Does Foker see it that way?
Via email, Foker said he is not only "generally supportive" of Obamacare, but thinks it didn't go far enough, saying, "Unfortunately, it was written by the insurance and drug companies so not great. Most of the many flaws of American medical care are still present." Foker also suggested that Republicans should be happy with what is a Republican-developed, "private-solution," but they are more interested in obstructionism, saying, "they're never happy." Not quite, the "I never would have gotten into medicine if Obamacare was around way back when!" that Johnson suggests.
Digging a little deeper, Lounsbury piece added, "Foker was trained by the government, was a government doctor when he did a government-developed procedure in a government hospital, and now says he likes Obamacare, but doesn't think it has enough government."
To be sure, it's rarely a good idea to draw sweeping conclusions from the perspective of one physician, but the point is, Sen. Ron Johnson has based much of his hatred of the Affordable Care Act on the medical care that saved his daughter.
According to the doctor responsible for that medical care, Johnson's wrong.