Suzanne Somers once played a part on a less-than-exciting, thank-god-it-ended 1970s TV show that exploited the twin stereotypes of flaming gay men and brainless blond bimbos. She tried to jack her costars for an extra cut of the loot when the series became briefly popular, they told her to get lost, and her career promptly took giant shit. Somers mercifully almost disappeared from the public eye, only surfacing more recently after medical technology saved her life, a favor she returned by putting out books hawking quackery and quack cures. So clearly when the Wall Street Journal needed an expert on healthcare, she told them to come and knock on her door. The link below goes to LGF so don’t feel like you’re rewarding the Journal for the bait. Let’s do a quickie fisk:

LGF — My sister-in-law had to wait two months to get a General Practitioner. During this period she spent her days in bed vomiting continuously, unable to get any food or drink down because she couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor. When she finally did, the doctor said, “Oh you don’t need me, you need a specialist.” That took another two weeks until she got a pill that corrected the problem.

No, Mrs. Somers, that never happened and here’s why: vomiting continuously for just a few days could easily put a healthy person in the ER with a premium case of dehydration, a week of continuous vomiting would be a life threatening condition, if someone somehow managed to survive more than a few weeks of that they’d be on the verge of starvation.

All of my husband’s cousins are doctors. Several have moved to the U.S. because after their years of intensive schooling, they want to reap financial rewards. My 75-year-old Canadian girlfriend was denied treatment because she was too old. She died recently, having been given palliative care. That’s all the system would allow.

OK … so all your husband’s cousins are doctors, some of whom specifically moved to the US to clean up, and yet between that presumed wealth and your own Hollywood millions, none of you lifted a finger to help a sister-in-law who was vomiting for two months straight and being ignored by the medical profession, or a best friend who was slowly dying from medical neglect even though the basic healthcare to keep her in the pink was easily obtained, according to your editorial, just over the border where you and they all live in luxury? Uhuh …

Affordable care will allow for pre-existing conditions. That’s the good part for retirees. But, let’s get down and dirty; the word “affordable” is a misnomer. So far, all you are hearing on the news is how everyone’s premiums are doubling and tripling and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that the whole thing is a big mess.

I have not heard of a single person on the news whose premiums are doubling or tripling, with the possible mathematically questionable exception of someone who was paying zero because they could not get insurance at all thanks to the games insurance companies were playing. I can point to plenty of people whose premiums are being cut in half or a third or even, in my case, about a fifth.

Boomers are smart. They see the train wreck coming… most I speak with think the Affordable Care Act is a greater Ponzi scheme than that pulled off by Bernie Madoff…. An earlier version of this post contained a quotation attributed to Lenin (“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state”) that has been widely disputed. And it included a quotation attributed to Churchill (“Control your citizens’ health care and you control your citizens“) that the Journal has been unable to confirm.

The italics were added after a no doubt horrified editor got a good look at the drivel that had just been published under their masthead. That editor should be horrified, Somers just played the Journal for complete fools.