WhatFinger

With the millions upon millions of dollars in which Hollywood is awash, they are dumping their own healthcare facilities

Hollywood Extols National Healthcare While Closing Its OWN Actors Hospital and Long-Term Care Facili


By Warner Todd Huston ——--February 24, 2009

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The self-aggrandizing denizens of Hollywood constantly scold Americans over a lack of national healthcare. It is the biggest failure of American society ever that there is no cradle to the grave program for free health care, they constantly tell us.

And now, in keeping with these nearly universal Hollywood “principles,” to prove how Hollywood is far more moral than we lowly citizens of flyover country, and to show that they are better than the great unwashed in the backwaters of America… Hollywood is closing its nearly 90-year-old Motion Picture Fund hospital and accompanying long-term living facilities for aging actors. Yep, dumping it. Walking away from the facilities for free healthcare for actors. Fuggedaboutit. Sean Penn has advocated for national healthcare in the U.S. basing his interests upon his close personal friendship with the dictatorial, socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The twin activists of Susan Sarandon and hubby Tim Robbins have claimed that healthcare is one of the most important issues facing the country today. Many of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been heard to lament about how healthcare is something that only the caring, you know, care about, and stuff. And now, after 87 years, Hollywood is shutting down the facilities that have given succor and care to some of the most famous actors in filmdom’s history. Yes, with the millions upon millions of dollars in which Hollywood is awash, they are dumping their own healthcare facilities. So, with the many millions with which they could easily fund it laying untapped, why exactly should everyone else feel that the idea is as important as these actors so commonly claim it is if they even refuse pay the bills for their own kind? Is George Clooney so hurting for cash that he can’t pay a little to the healthcare fund? Is Marlo Thomas in the poor house? Is Ed Asner or Mike Farrell standing in a bread line somewhere? Interestingly enough, the reason they are closing the facilities is because the trust funds arranged to fund them is running out of money. Sadly, they fail to see that this troublesome situation is just like the federal government’s!
“MPTF is initiating these changes because it’s the right thing to do, but the fact is that we have no choice,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chair of the MPTF Foundation Board. “Although we are in good shape today, the acute-care hospital and long-term care facility are generating operating deficits that could bankrupt MPTF in a very few years. . . . If MPTF doesn’t do something now, pretty soon it won’t be able to do anything.”
Katzenberg could just as easily have been speaking of Medicare or Social Security, couldn’t he? The simple fact of the matter is that these sorts of “free” health care programs neither work in the long run, nor are “free” in any meaningful way. Again, these self-important Hollywood types have nearly unlimited amounts of cash, yet they can’t adequately fund a “free” healthcare system for their own fellows? Then they insist that the rest of us invest in a similar system with the federal government taking the same role that failed for them? Hypocrites.

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Warner Todd Huston——

Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as Breitbart.com, among many, many others. He has also written for several history magazines, has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.

He is also the owner and operator of Publius’ Forum.


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