Republican Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie has left people stunned after vociferously opposing the idea of Medicare For All for deeply nonsensical reasons.
For Massie, it's not the usual Republican bugaboos about the notion of universal healthcare setting him off, like the cost or the fallacious notion that it infringes on people's freedom choice.
Nope. Massie's objection to Medicare for All, as he posted on Twitter, is that many Medicare patients died of COVID-19. Yes, we promise you this is a real thing that Massie, a person with two advanced degrees from MIT, actually said.
See his tweet below.
Massie (actually, seriously, unironically) tweeted:
"Over 70% of Americans who died with COVID, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll ?"
Statistics for the share of COVID deaths who were Medicare patients are hard to come by since the pandemic is ongoing, so whether or not Massie's claim is correct is tough to verify. But that's not why it's a deeply dumb tweet.
It's a deeply dumb tweet because more than 75% of COVID deaths are 65 years of age or over--the exact demographic Medicare serves, with nearly all American seniors enrolled in the program. So of course the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths were people on Medicare.
It would be wholly unsurprising if the number were actually more than Massie's cited 70%, in fact. And it would still be a basically meaningless statistic that says nothing about the quality of care that Medicare recipients receive--which is actually quite high.
That's why seniors overwhelmingly approve of the program, and why Republicans leave it alone year after year, despite the program being the literal definition of the thing they claim is the greatest evil on Earth: socialism.
In short, Massie's tweet is almost impressively nonsensical, and it had people on Twitter banging their heads against the wall.
In conclusion, let's all remember that correlation isn't causation.
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