NICK KRISTOF’S OBAMACARE SOB-STORY COLUMN: Busted. “Brodniak is a patient at OHSU — and has been a patient there for the past three weeks. In other words, at the time Kristof’s article was published this past Sunday, Brodniak was already being treated and cared for by some of the best neurologists in the country! . . . Kristof’s readers have been raising money to pay for the Brodniaks to get him treated. But Brodniak is covered. He doesn’t have to pay a dime.”

One presumes that Kristof came up with the saddest, scariest healthcare story he could find. That it turned out to involve a man who was already getting treated for free suggests that the healthcare “crisis” is something less than Kristof makes it out to be.

UPDATE: Reader Bob Therieau writes: “..but rather than rely on the false assumption that there is no healthcare crisis in this country, it seems a much safer bet to me to presume that Kristof is a hack.”

They’re not mutually exclusive. Health care policy is suboptimal, but there is no “crisis.” Talk of a “crisis” is just a PR effort to get us to accept a different set of suboptimal policies that are more to the liking of certain interest groups.