My Heart Goes out to Jimmy Kimmel But Using His Story to Plug Obamacare is Disingenuous

I like Jimmy Kimmel. I liked him when he was the host on Win Ben Stein’s Money which was one of the greatest game shows ever. I liked him when he and Adam Carolla hosted The Man Show.

I give him a lot of credit for going on television and allowing himself to get emotional while telling the story of his son being born with a heart defect. That took some courage. However, using it as a platform to plug Obamacare and complain about federal budget cuts is disingenuous.

I don’t really hold it against him because he’s clearly speaking from some very real emotion and he’s not necessarily thinking logically with all those neurotransmitters flooding his system. The people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are piling on to use his experience for their own political purposes are crass opportunists deliberately misleading people.

Let’s count the obvious logical fallacies at work here.

1. The most obvious is the appeal to emotion. Emotion proves nothing about whether Obamacare is a reasonable solution to problems in the healthcare system, but telling a tear jerker makes people receptive to believing an argument even if it doesn’t have logical merit.
2. It’s an anecdotal argument for Obamacare. Using Kimmel’s story as evidence of anything is dishonest. What an emotionally distraught talk show host witnessed is not enough data to create a national policy, even if he witnessed something that in some way indicated that Obamacare was working. It also neglects all the experiences of people who have lost insurance because of Obamacare.
3. This is also a case of begging the question. Those using this to argue in favor of Obamacare are basically saying that Obamacare is necessary because problems exist in the healthcare system. They’re presuming that Obamacare is the solution to the problem without proving it. Democrats often do this. If you don’t accept their proposed solution they accuse of you denying that there is a problem or even of desiring to perpetuate a problem. Again, dishonest as the day is long. The same applies to the budget cuts to NIH that Kimmel brings up. That NIH funds Children’s Hospital is not justification for their entire agency budget.
4. Kimmel winds up with a couple of straw man arguments. “No one should ever have to decide whether they can afford to save their child’s life.” Nowhere in his story did anyone have to make such a decision. In fact he explained how people of all financial situations were at the hospital receiving care thanks to the private charity from companies like Costco and Disney. Then he used another straw man by saying that the political fight over Obamacare is nothing more than partisan bickering.

We will never solve the problems in our healthcare system if people refuse to honestly address what they are. The real problem is that there are those who don’t want to honestly address the issues. They just want to manipulate you into backing their idea using anything they can.

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