FREE TO DIE IN DEBT

Ron Kall reported this a couple of days ago at the Huffington Post:

Libertarian Legacy? Ron Paul's Campaign Manager, 49, Dies Uninsured, Of Pneumonia, Leaving family $400,000 Debt

What a testament to the Libertarian creed, which abhors the idea of universal health care. This loyal, passionate man who died too young left his family a debt of $400,000 in medical bills. And who knows whether he put off getting treatment for the pneumonia that killed him because he was uninsured.

Kent Snyder did some amazing work on the Ron Paul Campaign....

The poor guy raised tens of millions of dollars and couldn't afford the $300-$600 a month that COBRA medical insurance would have cost....

(I think it would have been a bit more than $300-$600 a month -- The Kansas City Star reports that Snyder "was uninsured, his sister Michelle Caskey said, because a pre-existing condition made the premiums too expensive.")

More from Kall:

A website has been created to help raise the $400,000 to pay the medical bills.

Unfortunately, that website, which seeks $400,000 by July 17, still has about $381,000 to go. Hey, come on Paulites, where's your Love Revolution? In the words of your candidate (who, of course, is an M.D.), "We have a moral obligation to help our fellow man."

But I should put that Paul quote in context:

A major problem with today's society, according to Paul, is the confusion of "needs" and "rights": "We have rights to our lives and liberty and we have a right to pursue our happiness and we should have the right to keep the fruits of our labor. We have a moral obligation to help our fellow man." That doesn't mean, however, that we have a right to affordable health care.

Paul noted that because of all these governmental programs "charity work doesn't seem to exist anymore; yet there was a time when there was substantial charity work....We've gotten this way because the government put us this way."

So it seems that Ron Paul's vision is one in which people are supposed to be on the brink of destitution as a result of medical bills, only to be saved from bankruptcy by their friends and neighbors. To Paul, that kind of crisis isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Well, Paulites, you're the ones whose minds are supposedly not colonized by the insidious desire to be servile to (ick!) government, right? So go to that website and pony up.