Joe Scarborough Asks GOP Senators "What Would Jesus Think?" (VIDEO)

Joe Scarborough and the other members of the ad hoc Starbucks marketing team known as Morning Joe hosted Sens. Tom Coburn and John Barrasso Tuesday to discuss their opposition to the current health care reform proposals wending their way through Congress. It was about as relevant as you can imagine! Coburn ignores the massive popularity of the public option in asserting that Americans don't want government involvement in health care. He gives us the same boilerplate about how government bureaucracies would not improve the terrible bureaucracies already extant in private health care, showing a naive trust in "market transparency" for an industry that's quietly shoveling money at these same lawmakers, beseeching them to delay or defeat the measure.

Really, there's only so much you can do, interviewing two Senate Republicans. Right now, the obstacles to health care reform are all internecine, Democratic party obstacles, so the Senate minority isn't really even relevant to the discussion. Nevertheless! I really appreciate Joe Scarborough for putting this question out there:

SCARBOROUGH: Back in the '90s, everybody was wearing these "What Would Jesus Do" wrist bands. I wonder, what would Jesus think about walking in to any emergency room in any urban center at 11:00 or 12:00 at night and seeing all of these moms bringing their children from poor families who don't have health care having to use emergency rooms as their primary care. Is that a moral system? Is there a better way to do it? How do we do it? We can't just say no, can we?

COBURN: No, and we shouldn't. We're not. and we're not doing it, Joe, First of all, 90 percent of those moms with kids are eligible for S/Chip and we've done a lousy job signing them up. we ought to have auto enrollment. The option, since they are not signed up, they're not aware of the benefits of the program is they show up at the emergency room. It's a terrible place to practice medicine. There's no continuity, you don't know your patient. What we ought to be doing, we have several programs today, let's make it work. That's the other things Americans are wanting. Don't change and take away the best health care system in the world, improve it. Don't spend my grandkids' money running it through the government when you can, in fact, work it better by getting greater value from what we're doing today.

Coburn's careful dodge of the underlying question notwithstanding, I think it's great that Scarborough is willing to pose these sorts of questions. He should expand this line of thinking to an examination of how infected the debate is with industry dollars, because I think Scarborough will come face to face with the well-known "God and Mammon" axiom.

Also of note, Coburn and Barrasso have some internet show called, "The Senate Doctors," which I imagine to be a steamy, soapy doctor show, like Grey's Anatomy. On this week's episode, Coburn and Barrasso help Mark S. with his scorching case of "wandering penis" by performing an exorcism at the C Street House.

[WATCH]

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to [e-mail] -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Comments

[StillAmused]

Any chance for a relaxing, informative test pattern in that grinding, tedious three-hour slot?
.

[Erling Limm]

Cool

[Rog49Thomas]

Next Mourning Joe will be asking Michelle Bachman about quantum mechanics, I suppose.

[Rog49Thomas]

It seems to me posing this question to these two fine gentlemen is like asking Joe the Plumber to explain relativity.

[Dosadi]

Jesus was a socialist and so was his father. I thought we Americans could at least read.

[Rog49Thomas]

I believe both still are.

[thendrickson46]

These guys point out that Medicare and Medicaid are full of inefficiency and fraud. Everyone agrees. But they were in charge for 8 years and did nothing to fix it. That is where the money is. Go after it!!!

But don't use it as an excuse to avoid fixing the other very serious problems with our medical system.

[Mike Barden]

they really coulda had a simple answer, Jesus is on my side. Whooooooooooooops they've tried that one.

[blood1]

NOTE FROM TEXAS:

As states DO NOT HAVE to participate in this program, which inconveniently been the choice of Gov Perry, then all the words spoken by these Senators are useless in Texas.

[Lark817]

They can't deny pre-existing conditions but they can charge a lot more for coverage probably. I mean I really want reform, I just don't want the Republicans and those phony Dems, the "blue dogs," watering it down to constitute nothing new and improved at all.

[motoGpifupleez]

Jesus would think "Why are all these people who call themselves Christians nailing me to this tree and calling me a liberal and say I am taking their jobs"?

[Lark817]

As a 48-year-old white single woman with grown kids and no health insurance, I bet I'll be one of the 20 million Americans that still won't be covered. I'm hoping for something single payer and affordable. The last time I had health care, there was an HMO rep firmly between me and my doctor.

[ReedYoung]

I really, really do not like Joe Scarborough, but I have to give him credit for even hinting at the inherent contradiction of political christianity's corporatist and vindictive nature with Biblical Christianity's primary themes: compassion and forgiveness. But he did not say anything, that I noticed, to knock down the GOP's primary canard in this debate: that the government PAYING for medical care equals the government MANAGING medical care. The whole point is to cut out private "insurance" corporatists from continuing to dictate who may have what necessary medical treatment. He also didn't ask Coburn to address the savings inherent in making earlier treatment and preventive care available to everybody, and how much better the average American workers' productivity is likely to be as a DIRECT result. I wouldn't expect Scarborough to become a single-payer advocate overnight, but these are important arguments contrary to Coburn's assertions, which he was mainly allowed to spew, unchallenged.

[doodlebug2]

Oh Yeah , all you liberals, well my friend has a friend whos dad's second cousins friends daughters brother had to get some medical care in a socialist country and he was beheaded for asking.

[SarcasticFringehead]

Huh?

[ReedYoung]

He's conflating socialism with (1) atheism and (2) totalitarianism, which is utterly false in both cases. Privatized medical care is unsound capitalism because need ("demand") for medical care does not alter with supply as the theory of capitalism describes. Keynes was right, there are exceptions to even the most perfect free markets' efficiency, which only governments can solve. Medical care is definitely one of those exceptions.

Because medical care is not something that the market can decline if it becomes too expensive, the profession is much less subject to standard interactions of supply and demand; demand is nearly static, and the only way to reduce it is to make supply MORE available, which cause people to seek treatment earlier, get more preventive care, and need less costly care later. The "health insurance" industry cloaks this captive market phenomenon in a veneer of "free market" competition which is trivially disproved by each and every case of a person suffering a life-threatening illness or injury; we are not free to consider the economic costs and shop around.

Privatized medicine is predatory, un-Christian, and it is not even sound capitalism.

http://www.reedyoung.org/politics/general_welfare/medical_care/2009/07/06/index.html

[powerlift2201]

and he had to wait in line for 72 hours!

[Rog49Thomas]

I think it's a pretty well known neocon fact (though that doesn't make it any less untrue) that those who ask for socialized medicine will be shut out of Heaven by a justly angry God.

[Weirdwriter]

Pretty funny!

[maggienash65]

I don't know what he would say, Joe, but I googled

[vim876]

Mammon much?