On Wednesday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, who also had to go through the heartbreak of watching his small child undergo open-heart surgery, took issue with Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue on Monday in which Kimmel cited his son’s open-heart surgery as a means of championing Obamacare.
After telling the story of his infant son’s birth, subsequent diagnosis of heart trouble and the surgery that immediately followed at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, Kimmel launched into this:
I want to say one other thing. President Trump, last month, proposed a $6 billion cut in funding to the NIH. And thank God our Congressmen made a deal last night to not go along with that. They actually increased funding by $2 billion, and I applaud them for doing that. Because more than 40% of the people who would have been affected by those cuts at the National Institute of Health are children, and it would have a major impact on a lot of great places, including Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Which is so unbelievably sad to me.
We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, but until a few years ago, millions and millions of us had no access to healthcare at all.
Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you’d never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition. And if your parents didn’t have medical insurance, you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition. If your baby is going to die and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make. I think that’s something that whether you’re a Republican or a democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right? I mean, we do.
