So Poor People And Immigrants Don't Deserve Health Care?

Y'know, I thought I'd heard every single excuse that these anti-reform folks have concocted to prevent the advancement of health care reform. But here's a new one, brought to you by CNN:

"The president will use the money squeezed from Medicare to extend some form of coverage to the 35 million to 40 million people estimated to lack health insurance. And who are these people?

About one-quarter of them are foreign-born. Recent immigrants to the United States -- unlike the immigrations who arrived between World War II and 1970 -- have tended to be very low-skilled. Their labor is just not worth enough to their employers to support the high cost of an American health insurance plan: $13,000 a year, on average, for a family of four."

That's right: David Frum is arguing that people who are uninsured don't deserve medical coverage if they're 1) foreign-born Americans, or 2) people who never had a chance to go to college.

Who knew that conservatives thought only native-born, college-educated people deserve to be healthy? And wait, how is it that they're always accusing liberals of being "elitists"?

It gets even freakier and more xenophobic as you read on:

"Over the opposition of some 80 percent of the American people, your government allowed millions of poor newcomers to enter the country, many of them illegally. (Over the past 10 years, half of all immigrants to the United States have arrived illegally.)

These people cut the lawns of your more affluent neighbors, tended their babies, cleared their tables after their restaurant meals."

Does anyone else realize that a MAJOR NEWS OUTLET has published an editorial that says that poor people working service jobs don't deserve health insurance? That only wealthy people or the elderly should get to go to the hospital?

I officially give up. If this is the quality of the national debate over this issue right now, I'm done. Conservatives must not be taking this seriously if they're going to argue that a professor deserves to get affordable prescription drugs while a gardener or a nanny does not.

The most amusing part is that Frum is arguing that these poor people make so little money because they're somehow stupid, or unskilled. As a Bush conservative, this guy would probably oppose raising the minimum wage or increasing federal grants to help poor people go to college— and yet he thinks the poor shouldn't have health insurance precisely because they're apparently worth so little as unskilled workers. How does his head not explode from the cognitive dissonance?

This is not a serious argument, and I'm offended that CNN even allowed this to be published. Guys, when you've come up with some real talking points, come talk to me.