Narratives Are Hard Sometimes

As we continue to examine Barack Obama's boffo performance on Wednesday, one thing slipped my attention. I had always thought that the principal problem with the medical industry was the evil insurance companies, or so I've been told.

Obama gave us another enemy on Wednesday night -- doctors themselves, especially those evil tonsil-taking doctors. And the proprietor of the blog Rightwing Czar noticed:

Hasn’t Obama been telling us this whole time that it is the big bad insurance companies that are causing the problems in health care? Aren’t they the ones that are making record profits and tying the hands of doctors in giving good patient care?

That's what I thought, too. Which is why the president's bizarre rant about tonsils was so revealing. Back to you, RW Czar:

But the President might have accidently revealed his hand last night when he started talking about doctors trying to make money. He is clearly saying that he does not want doctors making decisions about patient care because they are only interested in profit. If Obama believes that doctors can’t be trusted to make good decisions about what a patient really needs, then why should we believe him when he says he wants to make sure that it is doctors who make those decisions?

An excellent question. One would hope that we get an answer to that question in the coming days. That's not the way to bet, though.